New Zealand
Solid Energy New Zealand Ltd., Christchurch, NZ, is flaring gas to test the commercial viability of flow rates from four appraisal wells at its Huntly coal seam gas project on New Zealand’s North Island 100 km south of Auckland.
Solid Energy, in a joint venture with Resource Development Technology of Colorado, drilled the wells to the Kupakupa and Renown subbituminous coal seams at a depth of 400 m 10 km west of Huntly. The resource at Huntly is estimated to be 300 PJ, as large as that at Kupe gas field.
California
Foothills Resources Inc., Bakersfield, set production liner to 9,530 ft and plans to test the GB-4 exploratory well in Grizzly Bluff gas field in the Eel River basin.
The Humboldt County well, the first to have taken cores from the basin’s Pliocene Lower Rio Dell sands, has intermediate strings set at 5,400 ft and 8,200 ft.
GB-4 is 25 ft from the Zephyr well, which averaged 5 MMcfd of gas from Lower Rio Dell zones for 4 days in 1964. GB-4 encountered gas in the same zones. It is 3,000 ft west of a 1971 well that went to TD 10,300 ft and flowed gas from several deeper intervals. No gas market existed, and neither well was hooked up.
A completion unit will be brought in from the Sacramento basin to test GB-4, which encountered extensive gas shows and electric log indications of gas from the deeper formations.
