With mapping work done, Gulf of Mexico gas prospect inching closer to drill ready status

Australia-headquartered oil and gas player Prominence Energy has hired Netherland, Sewell & Associates Inc. (NSAI) to have the prospective resources assessment independently reviewed at a gas prospect in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico after detailed mapping work was carried out in a bid to tick all the boxes needed to make this prospect drill ready.

Prominence Energy recently got its hands on two adjacent exploration blocks – South Addition Blocks A87 & A90 in the Brazos Area – on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) via its newly formed wholly-owned subsidiary, PRM Energy Texas LLC (PRM Texas). These blocks are located off Texas in approximately 75 metres (250 ft) of water and cover an area of 11,520 acres (around 46 km2).

The Australian player has mapped and performed AVO analysis on seismic in the blocks and identified a sizeable gas prospect with an area of between 4,000 to 7,500 acres. The main prospect, Big Apple, is a Middle Miocene Corsair delta sand deposited between two salt diapirs. The sands are bounded by Upper and Lower Miocene shale prone facies which are likely to provide a good seal.

According to Prominence, all available seismic has been purchased, and provisional prospect mapping undertaken to confirm the Big Apple structure, which straddles the boundary of two blocks, A87 & A90, in the Brazos Area.

Furthermore, the provisional interpretation of the seismic has confirmed the presence of a closed structure with a most likely area of around 7,370 acres (29.8 km2 ). The main sand is interpreted to be about 43 m thick in the main area of the field, thinning to the north/northeast and thickening to the southwest.

In addition, a second shallower sand also with a Class II AVO anomaly is interpreted to be approximately 15 m thick and cover an area of 3,690 acres (14.9 km2 ). PRM has calculated internal prospective gas initially in place (GIIP) estimates based on typical reservoir parameters for the area.

In lieu of this, the firm commissioned Netherland, Sewell & Associates, Inc. to provide an independent audit of the prospective resource volume and gave them the mapping and volumetric calculations for validation/audit.

Alex Parks, Managing Director, commented: “PRM is very pleased with the progress to date, the Big Apple prospect is mapped and the area of the prospect is in line with the over 7,000 acres (29 km2 ) evaluation made on a sparser data set before we bid on the blocks.

“PRM looks forward to releasing prospective resource volumes in the coming weeks, once audited by Netherland, Sewell & Associates Inc. There is still substantial work to be done before the project can be considered drill ready.”

Parks further explains that PRM intends to gather further data on wells and fields in the area to produce analogues for comparison and further improve the mapping with broader basin analysis, seismic balancing to integrate data from multiple surveys, and if appropriate seismic reprocessing, AVO work and other desktop studies.

As this is expected to enhance the understanding of the prospect and its potential, the plan is to have it done before the year-end, so that, Prominence can be ready to launch a farm-out process in early 2024 ahead of the NAPE Conference held in Houston in February, says Parks. This farm-out is seen as a way to enable the project to move to the drilling stage as soon as practical.