BHP drills a dry hole – Trinidad Guardian

• Broad­side well fails

to find oil or gas

• BHP can­not com­ment

at this stage

• Ge­ol­o­gist still be­lieves big oil to be found

In what could be a ma­jor blow to the as­pi­ra­tions of the T&T’s en­er­gy sec­tor, BHP’s deep-wa­ter well Broad­side has failed to find oil or gas and is a dry hole. The well which car­ried with it the hopes of T&T and the ex­pec­ta­tion of a mas­sive deep wa­ter oil dis­cov­ery proved un­suc­cess­ful.

The Busi­ness Guardian has con­firmed from mul­ti­ple sources that the well did not find any oil or gas and had sev­er­al chal­lenges while it was be­ing drilled.

BHP Bil­li­ton yes­ter­day told the Busi­ness Guardian that is was just not in a po­si­tion to com­ment on the sit­u­a­tion. The com­pa­ny was asked the fol­low­ing ques­tions:

• Can BHP con­firm that its Broad­side well was un­for­tu­nate­ly un­suc­cess­ful and was a dry hole?

• What does this mean for its ex­plo­ration plans in the south­ern basin?

• Is this ef­fec­tive­ly the end of its ex­plo­ration pro­gramme and will there now be a fo­cus on the North­ern Li­cence?

Its spokesper­son Judy Dane re­spond­ed by sim­ply say­ing: “I checked with the team and we aren’t able to com­ment on this at this time.”

On Sep­tem­ber 15, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley host­ed an event at the diplo­mat­ic cen­tre at which he praised the com­pa­ny for its con­tin­ued in­ter­est in T&T and not­ed that BHP had be­gun drilling its Broad­side-1 well which was ex­pect­ed to test the oil play with­in BHP’s South­ern Deep-wa­ter Blocks, which in­cludes TTDAA 3, 5 and 6.

“If the finds of the Broad­side well are promis­ing, it can in­form the drilling of fur­ther ex­plo­ration wells in near­by blocks. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, a com­mer­cial dis­cov­ery in any of Broad­side’s Miocene tar­gets could de-risk the ma­jor­i­ty of the prospec­tive re­sources iden­ti­fied by Nether­land, Sewell and As­so­ciates, Inc (NSAI) in its au­dit of the coun­try’s crude oil re­serves and re­sources for year-end 2018.’ Row­ley not­ed.

This was not to be and short­ly af­ter the event the drilling of the well en­coun­tered prob­lems with stuck pipe and while the com­pa­ny was able to even­tu­al­ly con­tin­ue drilling, it nev­er hit any of its tar­gets and found noth­ing.

One of the coun­try’s lead­ing ge­ol­o­gists Dr Kr­ish­na Per­sad said he was very dis­ap­point­ed by the re­sults but ad­mit­ted that ex­plo­ration was risky.

He added, “The re­al­i­ty is that in ex­plo­ration you have a thir­ty, maybe 40 per cent chance of suc­cess and there­fore sev­en of every ten wells you drill will be a dry hole. BHP had a tremen­dous run of suc­cess in the North­ern Li­cense clos­er to Bar­ba­dos but that is not al­ways repli­cat­ed.”

Dr Per­sad said all was not lost as he is con­vinced that there was sig­nif­i­cant oil and gas to be found in T&T’s deep­wa­ter but BHP had just not found it as yet.

BHP has drilled four ex­plo­ration wells in the South­ern acreage and has not found oil. It has found some gas and con­den­sate but no oil. This has made those gas dis­cov­er­ies un­eco­nom­ic since they have not been large enough for deep­wa­ter.

Per­sad said that T&T was in the mid­dle of a trend that start­ed in Bar­ba­dos and ex­tend­ed to parts of Guyana, that it was proven the nec­es­sary source-rock was there and so to were the reser­voirs.

He does not be­lieve that the source rocks are so old that the win­dow of op­por­tu­ni­ty for the oil and gas to be in them is now closed.

Ear­li­er this year BHP’s vice pres­i­dent, Ex­plo­ration So­nia Scarsel­li in an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian spoke ex­ten­sive­ly about the Broad­side well.

Scarsel­li said Broad­side 1 would tar­get a much deep­er hori­zon.

“So we will pen­e­trate the shal­low­ness of that in­ter­val where we en­coun­tered oil seeps in the Le Clerc and Vic­to­ria wells but we will now go drilling deep­er than we have done in the past.

“Since we have a much larg­er un­der­stand­ing, a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of the full hy­dro­car­bon sys­tems and po­ten­tial for the area. In the Le Clerc well we en­coun­tered the oil seeps. So part of the well we will drill the next cou­ple of months it is to test this oil po­ten­tial.”

Scarsel­li said in the orig­i­nal Le Clerc well, the plan was to drill to rel­a­tive­ly shal­low depth but when there was gas and then oil seeps were found so the com­pa­ny de­cid­ed to con­tin­ue drilling giv­en that it was a fron­tier basin and wild-cat ex­plo­ration it want­ed to take as much in­for­ma­tion as it could from the well and on­ly stopped when the pres­sure came too much to con­tin­ue. So now they have a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of the ge­ol­o­gy BHP will take an­oth­er look at the acreage.

BHP’s vice pres­i­dent Ex­plo­ration said in the case of the North the com­pa­ny does not ex­pect to find oil be­cause she be­lieves that the source rock is over ma­ture.

“We test­ed that so we don’t ex­pect to find any lead with that. In the South is a dif­fer­ent sto­ry, so in the South, be­cause we en­coun­tered the shal­low sec­tion was bio­genic so it was lo­cal­ly sourced. So ex­pect to go deep­er to find oil be­cause we don’t think the oil has mi­grat­ed shal­low enough.

“It takes a cer­tain amount of time for the oil to mi­grate through the rocks and be­cause of the lev­el of ma­tu­ri­ty in the south we don’t think it has mi­grat­ed that shal­low yet,” Scarsel­li said.

She said there are sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences in the Guyana and T&T deep wa­ter and the com­pa­ny in­cor­po­rat­ed the in­for­ma­tion from Guyana to a mega-re­gion­al view of the basin.

She said the source rock we have in T&T deep­wa­ter is a Cre­ta­ceous source rock in the Cenon­ian age which is sim­i­lar to what there is in Guyana and most of the Cen­tral At­lantic.

She not­ed, how­ev­er, in terms of the fold of play, there are dif­fer­ences. “There are dif­fer­ences in wa­ter sys­tems and age com­pared with where we are look­ing, the main dif­fer­ence is the age of ma­tu­ri­ty of the source rock in Guyana vs T&T. So cer­tain­ly we’ll learn a lot from the ex­pe­ri­ence there but we’re al­so look­ing at dif­fer­ent pe­tro­le­um sys­tem over­all,” Scarsel­li said.

Scarsel­li said BHP’s strat­e­gy is to tar­get tier-one op­por­tu­ni­ties. She ex­plained: “We want to find the traps so we can de­liv­er mul­ti­ple hun­dred mil­lion bar­rels of dis­cov­ery. So that is like re­al­ly the min­i­mum thresh­old that we are look­ing and it could be a set of mul­ti­ple traps that can de­liv­er this amount. Nor­mal­ly, when you open a new play you can find maybe some larg­er traps and small­er traps but nec­es­sar­i­ly you need to have quite a large amount to move for­ward with the de­vel­op­ment, be­cause we are tar­get­ing large trap we are look­ing for the deep­wa­ter it is sort of num­bers we are talk­ing about,” Scarsel­li end­ed.

With ex­plo­ration bud­gets slashed glob­al­ly its any­one’s guess if BHP will con­tin­ue to have in­ter­est in the South­ern Li­cense.

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklyn Khan has been on record as say­ing that the gov­ern­ment want­ed to have the re­sults of the Broad­side well be­fore go­ing out in the first quar­ter with a new deep-wa­ter bid round. This news could not have helped T&T’s cause.

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