Oil and gas company Chariot has said it has made a significant gas discovery at the Anchois well in the Lixus License, offshore Morocco.
Using Stena Drilling's Stena Don semi-submersible drilling rig, Chariot drilled the Anchois-2 appraisal and exploration well to a total measured depth of 2,512 meters in 381 meters of water.
"Preliminary interpretation of the data confirms the presence of significant gas accumulations in the appraisal and exploration objectives of the Anchois-2 well with a calculated net gas pay totaling more than 100m, compared to 55m in the original Anchois-1 discovery well," Chariot said Monday.
Appraisal Target
Gas Sand B has a calculated total net gas pay of more than 50m in two stacked reservoirs of similar thickness. The upper reservoir is a continuation of a reservoir drilled in the original discovery well, Anchois-1, with the lower reservoir being newly identified, Chariot said.
Exploration Targets
Chariot said that Gas Sands C, M & O were successfully encountered with multiple gas-bearing intervals across a gross interval of 250m measured distance with no water-bearing reservoirs identified, "materially exceeding pre-drill expectations."
Previously discovered Gas Sand A was not targeted in the Anchois-2 well, due to the intention of evaluating it in the subsequent Anchois-1 re-entry operations, however, the Anchois-2 well encountered gas bearing sands at this level providing important additional subsurface data, the company added.
The well will now be suspended for potential future re-entry and completion as a production well in the development of the field.
The Stena Don rig will then move to the Anchois-1 gas discovery well to perform re-entry operations with the objectives of assessing the integrity of the previously drilled well, and if successful, providing a future potential production well for the development of the field.
Adonis Pouroulis, Acting CEO of Chariot, said: "I am delighted to announce that Chariot, as well as conducting a successful appraisal well operation, has made a significant gas discovery at the Anchois-2 well which materially exceeds our expectations. We continue to conduct further analysis on the data collected from the well, but as it stands, we believe the result is transformational for the company."
"This is a tremendous outcome and I would like to thank ONHYM, our partners on the licence, and everyone involved for their invaluable support, which enabled the well to be drilled safely, successfully and on time during a time of significant operational and logistical challenges posed by the current pandemic."
"With the recently announced key terms of gas offtake with a prominent international energy group, interest from two highly regarded institutional lenders to provide debt finance, an ongoing collaboration with a leading constructor of offshore gas projects and now this successful gas well result, the Anchois project is getting closer to helping provide a clean transitional fuel to support Morocco's industrial and economic growth. We look forward to providing a further market update once the appraisal campaign has completed."
Chariot has previously said that the Anchois development concept consists of subsea production wells tied to a subsea manifold, from which a subsea flowline and umbilical connect the field to an onshore Central Processing Facility, where gas is processed and then delivered into the Maghreb-Europe Gas pipeline via an onshore gas flowline.