Colombia's Rancho Hermoso adds two new pays

Dec. 8, 2009
Canacol Energy Ltd., Calgary, said its third and last development well of 2009 at Rancho Hermoso field in Colombia’s Llanos basin found oil in two previously nonproducing formations and flowed 33° gravity oil at the rate of 3,944 b/d from one of the new pays.

By OGJ editors
HOUSTON, Dec. 8
-- Canacol Energy Ltd., Calgary, said its third and last development well of 2009 at Rancho Hermoso field in Colombia’s Llanos basin found oil in two previously nonproducing formations and flowed 33° gravity oil at the rate of 3,944 b/d from one of the new pays.

Canacol Energy has 100% operated working interest in the field, and the Rancho Hermosa-5 well is in a southern extension area of the field that has remained undrilled since Colombia’s state Ecopetrol discovered Rancho Hermoso in 1984.

The well found oil in Upper Cretaceous Guadalupe and Paleocene Los Cuervos in addition to Eocene Mirador, the regular field pay. TD is 9,578 ft measured depth.

RH-5 penetrated Mirador 40 ft high to prognosis. It found oil pay in Mirador at 8,939-74 ft true vertical depth with 7 ft of net interpreted oil pay thickness and average porosity of 26%, Los Cuervos at 8,990-9,020 ft with 9 ft of net interpreted oil pay thickness and average porosity of 27%, and Guadalupe at 9,037-69 ft with 24 ft of interpreted oil pay thickness and average porosity of 28%.

Guadalupe perforations at 9,042-50 ft flowed at a final rate of 3,944 b/d and 318 Mcfd of gas, natural, with water cut decreasing to 6%, on a ¾-in. choke at 145 psi bottomhole flowing pressure. The interval was tested 24 hr with rate increasing steadily throughout the test. Canacol Energy believes that the produced water is completion fluid.

Unlike production from the Mirador reservoir, for which it receives a tariff for each barrel of oil produced, production from the Guadalupe and the Los Cuervos reservoirs will bring Canacol Energy 25% of gross oil production under the terms of the production-sharing agreement with Ecopetrol.