Australian oil and gas company Quadrant Energy has hired one of Transocean’s semi-submersible drilling rigs to drill the Phoenix South-3 well offshore Western Australia.
Carnarvon Petroleum, Quadrant’s partner in the permit, informed on Tuesday that the contract to drill the Phoenix South-3 well has been executed with Transocean and that the GSF Development Driller-1 semi-submersible drilling rig will drill the well. The GSF Development Driller-1 is a sixth generation semi-submersible with dual rig activity.
Currently, the well start window is between February 1 and April 1, 2018. The Phoenix South-3 well is being designed as a redrill of the Phoenix South-2 well that discovered gas and condensate at the top of the Caley interval. The Phoenix South-3 well is to be located within close proximity to the Phoenix South-2 well.
The Phoenix South Caley structure is estimated to contain a gross mean recoverable prospective resource of 489 Bscf of gas and 57 million barrels of associated condensate (being 143 million barrels of oil equivalent (boe), gross, Pmean).
The company said that the estimated condensate-to-gas ratio is very significant and is based on surface gas sampling from a permeable section at the top of the Caley Sandstone encountered while drilling the Phoenix South-2 well.
The primary objective of the Phoenix South-3 well is to evaluate the Caley interval that the Phoenix South-2 well drilled into but was unable to drill through and evaluate. The Phoenix South-3 well design is being constructed to specifically allow for the evaluation of this Caley interval, unlike the Phoenix South-2 well that was designed to evaluate a broader range of reservoir intervals.
According to Carnarvon, the successful control of the increased pressure encountered in the Phoenix South-2 well led Carnarvon and the operator to submit cost recovery claims under their respective insurance policies. These claims are currently in the final stages of assessment by the insurance underwriters. Proceeds from the claims are expected to cover the majority of the cost of drilling the Phoenix South-3 well.