The confirmed presence of ‘world class’ oil deposits offshore Guyana does not mean that reaching and recovering those will be equivalent to the proverbial ‘walk in the park’ according to an August 15 Oil Now report.
Earlier this week the online-based information and resource centre cited a report from the Norway-based energy research entity, Rystad Energy, as saying that going forward, oil recovery pursuits in the region are likely to find that Guyana is among the countries in the hemisphere where accessing rich oil deposits could prove to be the most challenging.
In a story which points to the “new opportunities and markets for the oil industry that are being opened up by Guyana, French Guiana, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago and Colombia,” Oil Now reports that more than 100 exploration wells are expected to be drilled in South America outside Brazil over the next 5 years. Oil Now cites a report by Rystad Energy which asserts the most of the activity will occur off the northern shelf of the continent where some of the deepest wells are located.
“We also see that Guyana, Trinidad and Colombia are where we will find the deepest and most complex wells… It is interesting to note that the deepest wells are to be drilled in Colombia and Guyana, two countries with fairly limited experience of drilling deep-water wells,” Oil Now quotes the Rystad Energy report as saying.
Rystad says that ‘the numbers’ indicate that in excess of fifty (50) wells are likely to be drilled in waters with depths of “over 1,000 meters” over the next two years and that most of these wells are concentrated in “the northern offshore regions of South America.” The report points out that while few wells have been drilled in ultra-deep waters by Guyana and Colombia, the operators, Anadarko, Exxon, Shell, and BHP, are “well-known” and that they “all have good track records in drilling deep water exploration wells.”
