Offshore staff
ABERDEEN, UK --Oilexco hopes to produce first oil from its Shelley discovery in the UK central North Sea next summer. The field's FPSO the Sevan Voyageur recently left the Yantai Raffles shipyard in China for topsides assembly in Rotterdam.
The company has drilled 22 well bores into Shelley so far, with 14 sidetracks. Oilexco was forced into a painstaking appraisal campaign to define the field's extent due to persistent doubts over seismic data reliability caused by a large, shallow gas accumulation.
Appraisal should be concluded after production simulation testing of the current (14th) wellbore has been completed.
Recently, Oilexco also drilled a five-leg appraisal well into the Ptarmigan field in central block 15/29b, again to map the accumulation's geological limits, and to calibrate the seismic data to the interpretation.
Currently, the company is working on a development that would involve a production well on Ptarmigan tied back to the Balmoral field floating production platform. This would be concurrent with a proposed gas conservation project at Balmoral designed to eliminate flaring. Ptarmigan's higher gas-oil ratios would mean that overall gas throughput at the platform would be substantially higher than at present.
11/14/2007
