Carnarvon Petroleum Ltd. has selected a jack up drilling rig for drilling the Buffalo-10 appraisal well in the East Timor sector of the western Timor Sea.
The company signed a letter of intent for the as-yet-unnamed vessel and a formal rig contract is being finalized. The well is scheduled to spud in late October.
Buffalo-10 is designed to evaluate the presence of a significant accumulation of attic oil in the field, left after the original development was shut in. Carnarvon says this interpretation has been supported using full waveform inversion technology to reprocess the 3D seismic data acquired over the prospect.
Carnarvon farmed out a 50% interest in the Buffalo redevelopment project to Advance Energy PLC in December 2020 and will be free-carried for the first $20 million of well costs. Carnarvon retained 50% interest and operatorship.
Buffalo field was discovered by BHP in 1996 when the permit was in Australian jurisdiction and brought on stream in 1999. It produced 20.5 million bbl of oil until shut in by Nexen in 2004.
When the Timor Sea marine boundary was redrawn in 2019, Buffalo came under East Timor jurisdiction.
