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The planet’s deepest well Tiber among U.S. Gulf’s biggest discoveries, but will require new technologies to develop Ray Tyson For Petroleum News
BP’s recent self-described “giant” oil discovery at the Tiber prospect in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico’s Keathley Canyon, situated about 25 to 30 miles from Kaskida, another monster BP Lower Tertiary discovery, likely will require years of appraisal work and testing to bring into development, given the area’s remoteness and technological challenges associated with this geologically deep emerging play.
In fact, majority owner and operator BP said the Tiber discovery well, at a total depth of 35,055 feet, including 4,132 feet of water, is the deepest well ever drilled on the face of the planet. Therefore, overcoming extreme pressures and temperatures at these depths alone promises to be difficult, even requiring new technologies, BP told Petroleum News.
BP holds a 62 percent stake in Tiber, followed by Brazil’s Petrobras with 20 percent and U.S. major ConocoPhillips with 18 percent. The Tiber discovery well was drilled from Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon, a dynamically positioned, ultra-deepwater semi-submersible rig under contract to BP.
Aside from future challenges, initial drilling results from Tiber, located on Keathley Canyon block 102 some 250 miles southeast of Houston, Texas, point to an immense reserve “in the same league” or “resource potential” as big U.S Gulf producers Thunder Horse, Atlantis and Mad Dog, BP spokesman Daren Beaudo said.
Did he say Thunder Horse? This Mississippi Canyon giant, with a facility capacity of 250,000 barrels of oil per day and 200 million cubic feet of natural gas per day, represents the largest discovery ever in the U.S. Gulf and stands second in productivity in the United States only to the BP-operated Prudhoe Bay field on Alaska’s North Slope.
Kaskida estimated at 3 billion barrels of oil in place Moreover, and perhaps more relevant, is BP’s own comparison to other Lower Tertiary discoveries in the U.S. Gulf, including what is believed to be the largest — Kaskida. BP said Tiber’s reserve potential could be as large as or larger than Kaskida’s estimated 3 billion barrels of in-place oil.
“If you are talking about in the same league, that’s kind of the neighborhood that it’s in,” Beaudo explained.
In 2006, positive results from the first Lower Tertiary production test, conducted on the Chevron-operated Jack prospect in Walker Ridge, elevated this emerging play to monumental importance in the U.S. Gulf. Also known as the deep Eocene or Wilcox trend, the Lower Tertiary play stretches several hundred miles from Walker Ridge westward through Keathley and Alaminos canyons, and is now believed to hold potentially billions of barrels of recoverable oil in untold dozens of individual prospects.
A glimpse at plans for Kaskida, BP’s first Lower Tertiary discovery in the U.S. Gulf, sheds some light on what to expect at Tiber. Kaskida, discovered in 2006 with an astounding 800 net feet of hydrocarbon-bearing sands, is undergoing what BP calls a “measured appraisal,” with one well currently drilling and another appraisal well scheduled for 2010. This would be followed by an “integrated completions” field trial, or field (production) test, in 2011.
“We need a step change basically in well production rates, and we need new completions technology to address higher temperatures, higher pressures,” Beaudo said of Kaskida. “So we would be looking to advance the development of those technologies during that time.”
Translated, BP evidently does not yet have all the technology needed to produce from the Lower Tertiary trend at Kaskida, located on Keathley Canyon block 292 at a vertical depth of around 32,500 feet, including 5,860 feet of water. Based on disclosed depths of the discovery wells, Tiber, after adjusting for water column depth, is nearly 4,300 feet deeper (below the ocean floor) than Kaskida, likely bringing to BP’s design and engineering table a whole set of pressure and temperature problems unique to Tiber.
New technology for Thunder Horse However, BP, the largest producer in the U.S. Gulf with more than 400,000 barrels of oil equivalent output per day, is no stranger to offshore challenges, including the development of Thunder Horse, which met with several delays and took nearly a decade to bring into production following its 1999 discovery.
“When we discovered Thunder Horse and acquired the leases … we didn’t have the technology in place to deliver it,” Beaudo noted. “We developed the technology that delivered it. It’s the same thing with Kaskida.”
Fortunately, Tiber partner Petrobras brings special Lower Tertiary expertise to the team as operator of the Cascade-Chinook development in Walker Ridge. This project, expected to come on-stream in the first quarter of 2010, will be the first in the U.S. Gulf to commercially produce from the Lower Tertiary, as well as the first to deploy a floating production, storage and offloading facility, in lieu of an export pipeline.
The next step for Tiber is to drill an appraisal well, although “we have not lined out the pace at which that happens, or how quickly we get on that,” Beaudo said. “But it needs to be appraised. We’ve got the one well (and) it’s very encouraging. We liken it to the resource potential of those big fields (in the U.S. Gulf). But we need to go through appraisal to determine its size and figure out what kind of development it will be.”
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