Exxon’s Mobil Payara well has been drilled to its total depth and the company is in the process of evaluating preliminary findings.
“Well, we have drilled the well to TD (total depth) and we are still evaluating the well at the moment,” Country Manager of Exxon Mobil Jeff Simmons told Stabroek News yesterday when contacted.
Asked if preliminary findings were positive, Simmons would only say, “Right now we are still evaluating. We are not going to say yes or no but we can say we are still evaluating.”
However, sources told this newspaper that while still early to affirm, the well shows positive promise similar to the company’s Liza one drilling results which has already seen huge projections of oil recovery.
In early November of this year, after confirmation that the Liza returns would be on the upper end of the their estimated 800 million to 1.4 billion barrels of oil equivalent, Exxon Mobil moved exploratory drilling 10 miles northeast from Liza, to its Payara prospect.
“The operator then plans to drill an exploration well at the Payara prospect, located approximately 10 miles northeast from Liza, with results expected by late January,” Executive Gregory P Hill of Exxon’s partner from the company Hess Corp, had stated during an earnings call brief back in October.
“In parallel, we continue to progress predevelopment activities at Liza and expect to be in a position to sanction the first phase of development in 2017.We remain excited not only by Liza, which is world-class in its own right, but also by the significant further exploration potential of the very large Stabroek Block, which as a reminder, is the equivalent of approximately 1,150 Gulf of Mexico blocks,” he had added.
Exxon Mobil executives has echoed most of Hess Corp’s positions and expressed their optimism about Payara yielding similar results as Liza. However, the oil giant’s representatives said that they did not want to “get ahead of themselves.”
“We also want to make sure in the exploration programme that we don’t get too ahead of ourselves. We want to make sure that we’re fully integrating in the learnings into the regional geology, so that we upgrade our potential exploration programme going forward. So, it’s a pace programme, it’s making sure that those
learnings are being fully integrated, and then making sure that when we do discover additional resources or learn important information like we learned at Skipjack (an earlier drill site) that we integrate that into, not only our expression programme, but the scope of the full development,” ExxonMobil’s Vice President, Investor Relations, Jeff Woodbury said at a similar teleconference for his company.
“As it pertains to our initial phase development, it’s been fairly consistent in the scope as it was conveyed in the application we filed for environmental review with the government, I’ll tell you that this is real time, the organization is looking for ways to further enhance value. And as we progress that development planning and early engineering, we will learn more which will cause us to make adjustments. But very optimistic about the future in Guyana and we think we will bring a lot value to the government and people of Guyana,” he added.
Minister of Natural Resources and the Environment, Raphael Trotman said recently that government remains optimistic with the start of the Payara drilling.
“This is a new opportunity,” Trotman had said of the Payara exploration.
As it relates to the Liza well, both the government and Exxon Mobil will face questions over the Environmental Impact Assessment that has to be undertaken for any such large scale development.
