Orinduik oil discoveries similar to Venezuela, Brazil crude

…as operators eye 2 dozen leads for 2020

Tests carried out on samples from the recent successful oil discoveries by Tullow and its Joint Venture (JV) partners in the Orinduik block in Guyana’s offshore Exclusive Economic Zone have found that the oil is not dissimilar to the commercial heavy crudes currently in production in the North Sea, Gulf of Mexico, the Campos Basin in Brazil, Venezuela and Angola.
As such, a third-party consultant with heavy oil development and economics expertise is being engaged “to help conduct preliminary evaluations related to production schemes and commercialisation”.
This was announced this past week by Eco Atlantic Oil and Gas Limited—15 per cent share partner in the Orinduik block.
According to that company, JV partners are eyeing at least 22 wells in the coming year with half of those holding greater than 30 per cent chance of success.
The Orinduik JV partners are Eco Atlantic, Tullow Guyana – which is the operator with a 60 per cent stake— and Total Exploration and Production Guyana, which holds the remaining 25 per cent.
The minority partner this week in providing its most recent Unaudited Results and Corporate Update, claims to be ready to put in its US$120M share of the investments needed for this year.
It was noted too that technical and commercial evaluation work is ongoing and the company is considering alternatives for further drilling and testing and a number of development scenarios and production alternatives.
Providing an outlook for the Guyana operations, it was reported that the block operator has proposed a further fine-tuning analysis of the upper cretaceous reservoirs, and the operator has announced a plan to incorporate the Carapa well data into Orinduik’s existing geological models and technical analysis over the coming period.
Further, the partners are said to have a plan to integrate the discoveries at Jethro and Joe with the Carapa discovery with the rest of the regional data now available and to incorporate this data into a reprocessing of the 3D seismic already shot on Orinduik.
“The intent is to provide further definition to the Cretaceous interpretation and target selection for drilling”.
According to the company, “multiple prospects are currently being reviewed with high-graded candidates under consideration for the next drilling programme. Eco is fully-funded and is pushing to drill a minimum of at least one upper Cretaceous target as soon as practically possible for its partners”.
It was disclosed too that consideration is being given to prioritising a stacked multi-target well.