Kazakhstan
Big Sky Energy Corp., Calgary, began production from its Morskoe Block on the Caspian Sea northeast shore.
The company is trucking 5,400 b/d of clean oil from a tank battery that serves two wells to an offloading point in Prorva oil field 30 km away. A third well is to be tied in within a week.
The company plans to rework existing wells and drill new wells to exploit deeper reservoirs on the block.
Suriname
State-owned Staatsolie launched a licensing round for three blocks from shore to deep water in the Atlantic Ocean near the southeastern corner of the country’s offshore area.
Bid deadline is July 2 for Block 37, covering 8,758 sq km, Block 36 at 3,407 sq km, and Block 15 at 2,552 sq km. All are in the underexplored Suriname-Guyana basin. A 2006 data package is available that includes 2D seismic data acquired and processed in 2005.
Syria
Dual Exploration Inc., Calgary, took a farmout from Stratic Energy Corp., Calgary, of a 31.67% participating interest in Block XVII in southwestern Syria, subject to government approval.
The block covers 5,076 sq km in the Palmyride fold belt south of Palmyra, Cherrife, and Abu Rabah gas fields. It has a coarse 2D seismic grid and three previous wells. The companies are to spend a combined $5.2 million in 31⁄2 years on 625 line-km of seismic data and one exploratory well.
Stratic is operator with 35% working interest, and Kuwait Foreign Exploration Co. has 33.33%.
Venezuela
Shell Venezuela SA is producing 25,000 b/d of light oil from Lower Cretaceous Cogollo carbonates at 16,400 ft in Urdaneta West field just west of Lake Maracaibo.
Matrix properties were found to control production rates and ultimate recovery, whereas the reservoir was long considered a fractured reservoir similar to others in the area, said Poppelreiter and others in a paper in the AAPG Bulletin for December 2005.
Matrix porosity ranges from 2% to 16% and averages 3%, and matrix permeability averages less than 0.01 md and ranges as high as tens of millidarcies.
A 26 ft thick oyster packstone present throughout the field yields economic production rates if porosity above 7% and permeability in the tens of millidarcies are encountered, the paper said.
Northwest Territories
Canada’s Northern Oil and Gas Directorate issued a call for bids until May 2 for two parcels in the Beaufort Sea-McKenzie Delta area.
Parcel 1 covers 56,406 ha in the Beaufort Sea 70 km west of Tuktoyaktuk. Parcel 2 covers 99,942 ha off the Yukon 160 km west of Tuktoyaktuk.
The directorate offered exploration licenses for 9 years consisting of consecutive 5-year and 4-year periods. Drilling a well in the first period qualifies the license holder to retain the license for the second period.