BHP Billiton, the operator of all of the deepwater blocks awarded by Trinidad and Tobago, has said it will decide how many wells it will drill based on its ongoing interpretation of the 20,000 sq km of seismic data it has collected in 2,500-8,500 ft of water.
In an e-mail response to several questions from OGJ, the Australian outfit said the structures in the deep water are “complex” and in depth analysis is required. It added that the drilling campaign will begin 2016 but did not say in which quarter.
The company will be using Transocean’s Deepwater Invictus drillship, which can operate in as much as 12,000 ft of water and drill as deep as 40,000 ft below the surface.
BHP Billiton recently told a meeting of the Geological Society of Trinidad and Tobago that it is excited about the prospects from its deepwater blocks after seeing the initial seismic data. The company reported that it had seen massive structures and that it had also conducted a piston core sample that revealed an active hydrocarbon system.
It is expected that in the northern deepwater blocks in which BHP Billiton is operator with partner BP PLC, there is the same Oligocene trend as found in BHP Billiton’s Angostura field (OGJ Online, Oct. 9, 2014). Blocks 23(a) and TTDAA 14 are offshore the east coast of Trinidad and Tobago and BHP Billiton believes that they are a continuation of Angostura.
Angostura is BHP’s current field, in which it discovered significant oil and gas that has been difficult to produce because of significant faulting.
The northern blocks that were initially awarded to BP had the same trend as BHP’s Angostura field. Greater Angostura field lies in 36-46 m of water on the continental shelf, 37 km east of Trinidad and in the eastern Trinidadian sector of the eastern Venezuela basin.
