Santos’ Corvus-2 well confirms significant gas find

Australian oil and gas company Santos has said it confirmed “a significant gas resource” in the Corvus-2 appraisal well in the Carnarvon Basin, offshore Western Australia.

The well, located in petroleum permit WA-45-R, in which Santos has a 100 percent interest, is located some 90 kilometers northwest of Dampier.

Santos said on Tuesday that the Corvus-2 well intersected a gross interval of 638 meters, one of the largest columns ever discovered across the North West Shelf.

Wireline logging to date has confirmed 245 meters of net hydrocarbon pay across the target reservoirs in the North Rankin and Mungaroo formations, between 3,360 and 3,998 meters.

The company added that higher permeability zones than encountered in Corvus-1 were observed from initial pressure sampling completed in the well. Compared to Corvus-1, initial samples acquired from Corvus-2 indicate a significantly higher Condensate Gas Ratio of up to 10 bbl/mmscf and a similar CO2 content of 7 percent.

Corvus-2 is approximately three kilometers southwest of Corvus-1, which was drilled in 2000. The water depth at the location is 63 meters. The field is approximately 28 kilometers from the Reindeer platform, which delivers gas to the Devil Creek domestic gas plant near Karratha, and about 62 kilometers to a Varanus Island tie-in point. Santos has a 100 percent interest in all these facilities.

Santos said that the well was drilled using the Noble Tom Prosser jack-up drilling rig. The well will be plugged and abandoned as planned once logging operations are completed.

Santos managing director and CEO Kevin Gallagher said: “Corvus-2 has delivered a fantastic result and has opened up a number of additional exploration opportunities in the region. It is particularly exciting to have realized higher liquids content and significantly bigger resource volume than we expected.

“Corvus could be tied back to either our Devil Creek or Varanus Island gas plants, where it has the potential to increase the utilization of our existing facilities as well as provide backfill and extend plateau well into the 2030s.“