…grouping includes CGX Energy and Repsol
Canadian oil company CGX Energy Inc and Spanish company Repsol are part of a drilling consortium exploring for commercial amounts of oil and natural gas off the coasts of Guyana and Suriname and which will drill its first well this month, as drilling activity in the area ramps up to its highest levels to date.
Participating in the consortium are Murphy Oil, Inpex, Repsol YPF, Tullow and Toronto-based CGX Energy Inc. According to a press release from Oil Daily, the group has collectively secured the /Atwood Beacon jack up rig to test four blocks in the basin in the coming 12 months.
The rig is slated to drill five wells in the “highly prospective yet under-developed basin.” The release said that the first well – Caracra – was spud on November 8, slightly behind the October start date. This well is to be spud in the Murphy Block 37 offshore Suriname. Murphy will spud its second well, Aracari, in Block 37 next month.
The Atwood Beacon will then move to the 100 percent Inpex-Operated Block 31 next door before making its way to Guyana. There, the release said, the Repsol-operated Jaguar will test the Georgetown concession in the first half of 2011. The Turonian Prospect target there has a potential of 700 million barrels, according to CGX.
After this, the Atwood Beacon will make its way to CGX’s Corentyne Concession, allowing the company to resume operations halted a decade ago. “It is a very exciting time,” CGX’s CEO and President Kerry Sully told investors at a recent conference hosted by the New York Society of Security Analysts.
CGX Energy Inc. holds licences covering 7.8 million gross acres in the basin, including Georgetown and Corentyne, but is looking to farm out a portion of its interests in those two holdings.
Sully described the region as part of the broader “emerging equatorial Atlantic” play that includes new multi-million barrel discoveries off the coast of Brazil and new West African discoveries from Ghana to Sierra Leone.
According to the release, the regions were all joined together during the Lower Cretaceous period 100 million to 145 million years ago, when the sediments and organic material that now make up these hydrocarbon bearing zones were deposited.
CGX had planned to drill a well testing its Eagle prospect but work was halted when two Surinamese Navy gunboats ordered the rig to be removed. “The UN later resolved this row, leaving the bulk of the Corentyne Concession and the Eagle prospect under Guyana,” the release said.
Prior to the skirmish, companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Korea National Oil Corp and Burlington Resources entered the region in the late 1990s. But a series of political and geological factors scuttled development.