Trinidad and Tobago’s state-owned Petrotrin LLC has reported that it will make available to interested oil and gas companies the results of its extensive 3D seismic with a view to partnering in future exploration of its acreage.
In an interview with OGJ, Petrotrin Chairman Andrew Jupiter revealed that the company is strapped for cash and short on technical expertise and therefore felt the best option was to move into greater uses of enhanced oil recovery and also make the 3D seismic available.
“Part of Petrotrin’s strength is the acreage that we control. We have spent a lot of money acquiring data via a 3D seismic program,” Jupiter said. “We believe that we should make the data available to our partners who have been working with us as lease operators, or farmouts, but also to other companies that may have an interest. This is necessary because we believe that fresh eyes, fresh interpretation may help unlock more and more oil.”
Petrotrin on its web site has boasted that it had conducted the most extensive 3D seismic coverage in the history of its operations in both its Land North West District and Trinmar-North Marine operations offshore.
It said the results from these seismic surveys have informed a robust Petrotrin portfolio of drilling and exploitation opportunities both onshore and offshore.
The company also had enhanced the data by using prestack depth migration, which is a model-based seismic imaging methodology that works well for complex geological structures, such as subsalt layers and basement fractures. It is more expensive and time consuming, but is more likely to precisely determine the structure reservoirs.
Jupiter said Petrotrin was going after EOR because “where oil has already been produced there is more oil to be found.”
He said, “Most experts will agree that we have only produced somewhere between 15 and 20% of our oil in place. So in the past we have found oil and we have only been able to bring to market less than one fifth of the oil in the ground. We believe that using EOR, we will be able to produce another 10-15% of oil in place.”
He revealed that Petrotrin was in discussions with two companies that are interested in working with it to bring on additional crude oil using EOR.
Jupiter added that Petrotrin has approved Range Resources Inc. using EOR on two farm-out fields that it operates on behalf of Petrotirn as it tries to get more oil out of the ground.
