agent
some people think that the melting of the north pole sea ice will raise sea levels. It might a bit. The cooling of the sea by the melt water might cause local temperatures to fall below 4 degrees for a while. As everyone knows, the temperature of maximum density of that rather extraordinary liquid is 4 degrees and so local cooling could result in a bit of local expansion. I bet that they did not factor that into "The Models", which we must now all pay homage to.
Do you have a theory (other than the Buda water danger) as to why COP has focussed on the Austin chalk rather than the Eagleford? The neighbours seem to be focussed on the shale and our experience is that the chalk is difficult to drill. EME also has the experience at Quinn 3 in the Riverbend acreage of chalk. The natural fractures produce exciting flares during drilling but it must make the operation difficult as well as hazardous.
in kunde 1 burlington fracced the chalks.. they drilled a second vertical, a "twin" well called kunde 2, that well had massive pressure problems, and i heard there was some expensive equipment down hole when things went wrong, and they ended up cementing the equipment down hoile and getting out, later it was side tracked and drilled again as a well to purely to do down hole readings from when fraccing kunde 3.. i think eme invested in that one but its not been a great investment at all in terms of the well design not being considered for production..
why the interest in the chalks? why not? its a massive resource and technology was advancing. back then it was a new discovery, over the last 3 years its developed to a stage where conoco is about to embark on a drilling program. imho Q1 2010
if you look at petrohawk, with the use of clever technology, and with ceramic bearing technology they are drilling wells in weeks that took months before. although their eagleford acreages is productive, the chalks and eagleford in the sugarkane are many times more productive in condensate. i have been told many times that conoco are not in the region and not leasing acreages for the gas, its purely a very positive move on the condensate rich chalks and eagleford - sugarkane - thats their primary concern. i have never seen conoco spend any time on presentations concerning themselves with a new field, but the eagleford was highlighted in their recent announcements, and discussed many times in the presentation and in the Q&A.. that company has many plays and many irons in the fire, but the eagleford was very very much in discussion.. in my view its a very prospective project to them..
Conoco have now got somewhere with the sugarkane, they have fracced bordovsky which i am still hearing good things about. choppy has heard otherwise i know, but local talk is that the well is good. my own view on the eagleford is that technology is advanced enough to see many large operators commence exploration. although we are the first into the sugarkane, its clear the learning curve has progressed, no more are we hearing about east texas chalks completions being replicated in our wells, now we are hearing multistage fracs. more the eagleford progression imho
close by to our kowalik well hawthorn have a permit for a vertical a bit south of the 3 eog lyssy wells being drilled into the oil rich eagleford right now..
dan hughes liked their darlene well so much they are drilling a slightly longer well 1400 feet east of darlene 1h, called darlene 2h.. nice oil wells in the eagleford just a but north and east of kowalik, near falls city
[/IMG]
this is what saf posted last night in the uk, interesting article
“Investors Hope For Early Christmas Present From The Eagle Ford Shale Play”
For investors in Aurora Oil & Gas, 2009 has been a fairly quiet year, dominated by the ASX-company’s search for farm-in partners for its promising Sugarkane gas and condensate field in South Texas.That hunt concluded in September, when the company signed agreed farm-in terms with Hilcorp, the fourth largest private E&P in the US.
The deal, which signaled some much-needed uplift in the share price, means Aurora will now be free carried for the drilling, completion and tie in of up to seven new horizontal wells and the stimulation of the three existing horizontal wells on the field. This will put ten wells into production across its three Areas of Mutual Interest: Sugarloaf (20 per cent pre-farm-out), Longhorn (50 per cent) and Ipanema (80 per cent). In return, Hilcorp will earn up to 50 per cent of Aurora’s interest in the Sugarloaf and Longhorn Areas of Mutual Interest (AMI) and five/eights of the smaller Ipanema AMI.
With the terms agreed, the joint venture is keen to return to the field to test its potential. And that potential could be significant, with talk of a multi-tcf condensate-rich resource within the prolific and well known Austin Chalk formation and the emerging Eagle Ford Shale trend. The field, discovered in 2006, lies some 20 km south of the main Texas Austin Chalk trend and is on trend with recent Eagle Ford Shale discoveries.
Aurora holds over 20,000 net acres within the Sugarkane field, providing a solid footprint in what could turn out to be a world-class play, with independent petroleum engineers Netherland, Sewell & Associates giving the ASX group’s slice of the pie a 2C contingent resource estimate of 391 billion cubic feet of gas and 72 million barrels of condensate. This estimate comes at an early stage in the evaluation cycle. Since its discovery, 15 exploration and appraisal wells have been drilled into the reservoir, four within Aurora’s area of interest and eleven drilled by US oil major ConocoPhillips in an adjacent AMI. Yet it is only recently that the potential of the Eagle Ford Shale play has been recognized.
The growing regional buzz surrounding the Eagle Ford shale trend has seen increased investment in land and drilling activity on neighbouring leases. As we pointed out in last week’s note on Texon Petroleum, another ASX -company with ambitions in the US, shale oil and gas plays are big news in North America but they come with a health warning: they only work if the right completion and production solutions can be found to economically extract the hydrocarbons from these tight rock formations.
Some local operators are getting it right. NYSE-listed Petrohawk Energy has 16-operated wells in production on its lands to the southeast of Aurora, with an average initial rate of 7.8 million cubic feet per day of gas and 143 bpd of condensate, while the Sinor-5 well, operated by Pioneer Natural Resources some 18 miles to the southwest of Sugarloaf-1, flowed 8.3 million cf/d of gas and 500 bpd of condensate.
Aurora and its joint venture partners plan to learn from their neighbours. Two wells are producing limited volumes on the Sugarloaf AMI, Kennedy-1H and Kowalik-1H, with the unstimulated Kowalik well producing 10.3 million cubic feet of gas and 3,395 barrels of condensate over the September business quarter and the partially-stimulated Kennedy well producing just over 2 million cf of gas and 743 barrels of condensate for the three month period. A third horizontal well, Weston-1H, is not producing..There are hopes that hydraulic stimulation will significantly boost production.
Fraccing operations should get underway next month. The operator Texas Crude Energy Inc plans to carry out “multi-staged” fracture stimulations along the horizontal section, using an engineering solution that has proved effective elsewhere in the play. Each stimulation is expected to take between ten and fourteen days, meaning investors shouldn’t have too long to wait for some operations-driven news flow. The first new wells under the farm-in deal should get underway in Q1 2010. Two thousand and nine may have been a quiet year for Aurora but next year is already looking much livelier.