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February 2010

Vol. 15, No. 6 Week of February 07, 2010

Good news at Badami?

Savant exec guarded until data further analyzed, but two pay zones possible

Eric Lidji

For Petroleum News

While the company remains somewhat guarded about revealing results until it gleans more information from well logs, rumors of a significant hydrocarbon discovery from a well Savant Alaska completed drilling at Badami this winter appear to have a basis in truth.

When asked for results of the B1-38 well, testing the Red Wolf prospect at the eastern North Slope field, company executive Greg Vigil responded in a Feb. 1 e-mail:

“A review of the measurement while drilling logging suite has reasonably determined the primary objective Kekiktuk formation had an apparent water contact with additional gross interval above it. Although we cannot say definitively that the apparent hydrocarbon interval is filled with movable light oil.

“Additionally another hydrocarbon bearing interval was encountered in a shallower secondary objective formation.

“A significant amount of hydrocarbon has been introduced into the drilling mud system, and in the interest of health, safety, environment and preserving our investment in the well, no additional open-hole diagnostic work will be conducted and preparations are being made on the drilling rig to run a production liner over the prospective pay zones.

“As such, additional diagnostic work on both prospective pay zones will come in the form of production testing. The timing of this work is yet to be determined.”

Vigil also wrote, “The 5-1/2 inch liner is on bottom and to be cemented shortly.”

A rare piece of good news

Savant, an Alaska subsidiary of Denver independent Savant Resources, is drilling wells at Badami through an arrangement with unit operator BP. BP hopes improved recovery rates can jump-start the field, which has been shut down since the fall of 2007.

Savant began the B1-38 well in early 2009, but cut its drilling program short last April because of poor weather conditions on the North Slope. The company returned this winter, building a new ice road to the site and completed drilling the well using Doyon rig 15.

Red Wolf is an oil prospect in the Ellesmerian Kekiktuk formation, a rock unit equivalent to the oil reservoir in BP’s Endicott field. Savant also plans to drill a horizontal sidetrack into younger and shallower Brookian rocks from the Badami B1-18 well, to see if horizontal wells can better produce from the challenging Brookian reservoir at Badami.

BP started production at Badami is 1998, hoping for 30,000 barrels per day from the field, but tricky geology led to production rates less than a tenth of that goal.

The company suspended production for four months in 1999, and mothballed the field again in 2003 after production dropped further. BP kept the field off-line until 2005, when it planned to use horizontal drilling techniques to improve field production. However, low production rates ultimately led BP to take the field off-line again in September 2007.

The company hoped that leaving the field fallow would increase reservoir pressure, making it easier for oil to move through rocks, into wellbores and up to the surface. In August 2009, though, BP told the state that the reservoirs failed to recharge as hoped and asked to continue suspending Badami operations for another year, until Aug. 31, 2010.






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