Borders & Southern: Darwin could hold 263 million barrels

Borders & Southern, a London based independent oil and gas exploration company, has provided a technical update on its Darwin Gas Condensate Discovery in the Falkland Islands.

In April 2012 Borders & Southern made a significant gas condensate discovery with its first exploration well in the Falkland Islands. The discovery had a high condensate yield and a good quality reservoir. An initial scoping facilities study proposed an FPSO development, stripping out the liquids and re-injecting the gas back into the reservoir.

The company’s phase 1 reservoir engineering study indicated that a mid case of 200 million barrels of liquids could be recovered from the discovery. Subsequent to this work, the Company has enhanced the seismic data with rock physics information derived from the Darwin East well and undertaken a more detailed phase 2 reservoir engineering study. Additionally, the 2008 seismic data has been reprocessed and merged with the new 2013 3D survey.

According to Borders & Southern, the reprocessing of the 3D seismic has greatly improved the quality of the data.

“Resolution has been enhanced, amplitude mapping is sharper and fault definition has improved. This new data has confirmed our previous interpretation of the potential distribution of hydrocarbons over Darwin East and West,” the company said in a press release.

The phase 2 reservoir engineering study used a more detailed geological and petrophysical description of the reservoir, creating a 3D model in Petrel (The phase 1 study had used a simple layer cake model) and incorporated results from a laboratory revaporisation study and analysis from side wall cores.

“Our new base case model estimates a wet gas in place of 2.6 tcf and the recovered condensate of 263 million barrels (assuming no aquifer support). The increase in recovered condensate from our phase 1 model to the phase 2 model is attributed to improved net pore volume and an improvement in fluid recovery,” Borders & Southern further adds.

This new base case estimate of recoverable condensate of 263 million barrels is dependent on successful appraisal wells.

However, this resource assessment only includes the reservoir interval encountered in the discovery well on Darwin East.

“Our seismic interpretation indicates that Darwin West is structurally higher than Darwin East and that two additional potential reservoir intervals below the main reservoir, each displaying amplitude conformance to structure, may be encountered. These additional potential reservoirs do not extend over the whole structure, but nevertheless could add further to the total recoverable resource depending on their thickness and quality,” the company explains.

“Our technical work will now shift towards a detailed assessment of the merged 3D data volume. First pass observations of the 2013 survey are very encouraging. Improved seismic resolution and analysis of the seismic attributes will add to our understanding of the geology and prospect definition. There is a lot of work ahead but we are optimistic that it will result in an inventory of impressive low risk, amplitude supported prospects,” Borders & Southern concludes.