Integrated drilling services contract offered up for important probe offshore Newfoundland & Labrador
BP has hit the market with an inquiry for drilling services for a minimum one-well offshore wildcatting campaign it has pencilled in for eastern Canada, targeting a huge multi-billion barrel exploration target.
The supermajor operates exploration licences (ELs) 1145, 1146, 1148 and 1149 offshore Newfoundland & Labrador province and may drill at least one probe on this West Orphan basin acreage in 2023.
More wells may follow through to 2026, according to BP’s website.
A BP spokeswoman told Upstream last year that “2023 is the latest estimate for potentially drilling one well – Ephesus – offshore Newfoundland”.
Ephesus lies in about 1250 metres of water in EL 1145, where BP’s partners are US players Hess and Chevron.
Also called Cape Freels, Ephesus was originally thought to be a basin floor fan play but further studies indicated it is a more complex structure.
In 2020, BP described the prospect as a Tertiary channel-lobe complex up to 46 kilometres wide and 18 kilometres long, covering an area of about 460 square kilometres.
Speaking at a Newfoundland event last year, a senior executive at Nalcor, the former provincial oil company, suggested Cape Freels could house 4 billion to 5 billion barrels of recoverable reserves.
However, other Canadian executives were more conservative, indicating its resources could be around 1 billion barrels.
BP’s website said it plans this summer to conduct a remotely operated vehicle survey of the seafloor around potential well locations in EL 1145 “to determine whether benthic communities — including corals and sponges — are present”.
BP’s four licences cover a total area of almost 950,000 hectares and are located between 270 kilometres and 470 kilometres east of Newfoundland.
This week, the supermajor released an expression of interest to source a contractor to provide integrated drilling services (IDS) for this proposed exploration campaign, with responses due for submission by 25 January.
BP’s base-case plan is to award a single IDS contract, but it remains open to breaking up the workscope into smaller packages.
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Source: Upstream| This text was excerpted from the media outlet cited on January 12, 2022 and is provided to Noia members for information purposes only. Any opinion expressed therein is neither attributable to nor endorsed by Noia.
