A joint venture led by Cairn Energy PLC has made an oil discovery in its VR-1 well offshore Senegal, notching up its eighth consecutive successful well in the region since drilling began in 2004.
Consortium member FAR Ltd., Perth, announced that the VR-1 well intersected a 97-m gross oil column across multiple reservoirs and recorded the highest net pay in any well drilled there to date.
Wireline logging and sampling through the SNE section of the well have been completed and the well is now being deepened into the secondary Aprian carbonate objectives below SNE field.
VR-1 was drilled 5 km west of the SNE-1 discovery well and is being drilled to appraise the lower and upper reservoir units in the western sector of SNE field (OGJ Online, Mar. 8, 2017).
FAR said the Lower 520 reservoir, which is a key reservoir in plans for the Phase 1 development of SNE field, showed the best reservoir properties of all other reservoirs sampled in the field to date. VR-1 intersected a 16-m oil interval in this reservoir.
The deeper 540 reservoir, with an 11-m interval in oil, has only been seen previously in the SNE-2 well where the oil interval was only 2 m thick.
FAR anticipates that the results of the VR-1 well so far, together with the recent SNE-5 well results, will lead to a revision of contingent resources estimate for SNE field as well as impact the design of the development plan.
The 1C resource is currently estimated at 348 million bbl compared with the minimum economic field size of 200 million bbl.
FAR has 15% interest in SNE field while operator Cairn, ConocoPhillips, and Petrosen hold respective interests of 40%, 35%, and 10%.
