PERTH-BASED Victoria Petroleum NL – which plans to drill 17 wells in the next nine months – has placed its immediate chips on three prospects.
One of these is its Pipeline prospect, currently being evaluated at no cost to VicPet by the adjacent well Ekho-1 drilled by Tri-Valley Corporation in California’s San Joaquin Basin.
Ekho-1, drilled this year to a depth of 5,819 metres, is currently production testing ztarget sands in the interval 5,488m to 5,819m.
The Tri-Valley operator is confident that production testing of the oil and gas bearing sands in the target zone will be successful once mechanical down hole problems being experienced are overcome.
Ekho-1 is offsetting the 1973 Great Basins 33X-10 well, 0.3 kilometres to the west, which flowed oil and gas at 900 barrels per day and 3.5 million cubic feet of gas.
VicPet considers the major risk with the Pipeline/Ekho prospects is the engineering ability to successfully produce at commercial rates to surface the indicated major oil and gas resources in the ground.
Positive encouragement of the ability of modern engineering techniques to do this was provided with the July 6, 2000 announcement by the Bellevue Trend operators, Berkley Petroleum, that the Berkley East Lost Hills No.1 well on the Bellevue trend had been successfully completed for commercial production and tested at production rates of up to 23 mmcfd and 1700bopd.
VicPet is seeking a farminee to drill, complete and production test Pipeline No.1 and provide the company with a free-carried interest.
In addition to this, VicPet has developed a significant inventory of prospects over the last three years in the San Joaquin Basin Project area.
These are considered to have significant potential as the five prospects to be drilled from September 2000 through to early 2001 are in close proximity to previous or existing oil and gas production and wells.
The company has a 100 per cent interest in the Kingfisher and Raven prospects scheduled for drilling in September and October 2000. Strong farmin interest should result in VicPet having a near free-carried 25 per cent interest through the drilling of these two wells.
