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Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Repsol comes up dry on Pinter One well

by

20140419

Span­ish en­er­gy gi­ant Rep­sol has failed to find any hy­dro­car­bons on its Pin­ter One well which was drilled off the east coast.The dry hole rep­re­sents a ma­jor fail­ure for the com­pa­ny which has been try­ing to boost its falling crude pro­duc­tion from its Teak Sam­man and Pouis acreage.

In ad­di­tion, the dry hole is fur­ther bad news for the coun­try as the Pin­ter One well was ex­pect­ed to sure up a dis­cov­ery made by Bay­field En­er­gy Com­pa­ny in its EG 8 well on the Ga­le­o­ta block. Bay­field has since been ac­quired by Trin­i­ty Ex­plo­rations and Pro­duc­tion Com­pa­ny Ltd.

Trin­i­ty's chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Joel Mon­ty Pem­ber­ton told the Busi­ness Guardian that while his com­pa­ny was aware of the fail­ure of the well, it was not in a po­si­tion to com­ment on the im­pli­ca­tions for its own dis­cov­ery since it had not seen the re­sults which are held by Rep­sol.

Asked if he would ad­mit that the fail­ure of the well to show that the dis­cov­ery ex­tend­ed in­to Rep­sol's acreage, as was orig­i­nal­ly thought, would nec­es­sary lead to a re­duc­tion in the cal­cu­lat­ed re­serves, Pem­ber­ton said that made log­i­cal sense, but he was still not in a po­si­tion to speak de­fin­i­tive­ly about the mat­ter.

High­ly placed sources at Rep­sol said the well be­gan drilling on De­cem­ber 26, 2013, af­ter it was ap­proved by the min­istry's chief tech­ni­cal of­fi­cer Richard Je­re­my. It was wrapped up in Feb­ru­ary af­ter reach­ing its to­tal depth and fail­ing to find hy­dro­car­bons.Bay­field, not Trin­i­ty's EG8 dis­cov­ery, was an­nounced in March 2012 with great fan­fare by the Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine.

It was drilled to a to­tal depth of 8,133 feet (2,479 me­tres with well sands to­tals 421 feet (128 me­tres), of which 352 feet (107 me­tres) is gas and 69 feet (21 me­tres) is oil."Bay­field, at the time, said EG8 was de­vi­at­ed from its sur­face lo­ca­tion to­wards the south west in or­der to tar­get the cre­stal area of mapped hori­zons in the prospec­tive EG2/EG5 Cen­tral fault block. "The well en­coun­tered ten hy­dro­car­bon-bear­ing sand­stone reser­voir zones be­tween 1,364 feet (416 me­tres) and 6,000 feet (1,829 me­tres) be­low mean sea lev­el."

En­er­gy con­sul­tant He­le­na In­niss-King at the time said it is too ear­ly to say ex­act­ly how much oil is in the block or in the well be­cause enough tests have not been done. She said it is a good start to the pro­gramme, but more stud­ies are need­ed. Fur­ther, she not­ed no ap­praisal wells had been drilled to de­ter­mine the size of the find and, at best, it was pre­ma­ture.

Bay­field had told the Lon­don Stock Ex­change that a com­pre­hen­sive pro­gramme of log­ging and sam­pling had been con­duct­ed and sam­ples of oil were col­lect­ed in the oil zone and a mi­ni-drill stem test (mi­ni-DST) was con­duct­ed on wire­line."The da­ta con­firms light oil and good qual­i­ty reser­voir with pro­duc­tion po­ten­tial of more than 1,000 bar­rels of oil per day. Sam­ples of gas and gas con­den­sate were al­so col­lect­ed in oth­er reser­voirs."

Bay­field is cur­rent­ly in­te­grat­ing the new well da­ta in­to the 3d seis­mic map­ping to study the im­pact on con­tin­gent and prospec­tive re­sources. The com­pa­ny said EG8 well has demon­strat­ed de­vel­op­ment po­ten­tial of 32 mil­lion bar­rels (mmb­bls) of oil and 69 bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet (bscf) of gas in the EG2/EG5/EG8 cen­tral and east fault blocks.

Ini­tial in­ter­pre­ta­tion sug­gests that sub­stan­tial­ly all of the gas po­ten­tial lies with­in the Ga­le­o­ta li­cence, though the oil po­ten­tial ex­tends in­to an ad­ja­cent li­cence in which Bay­field has no par­tic­i­pat­ing in­ter­est.The ad­ja­cent field re­ferred to at the time was Rep­sol's block. Like Bay­field, the Span­ish gi­ant al­so used the jack-up drilling unit, Rowan Go­ril­la III. Un­like Bay­field, though, it failed to find any­thing.


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