If you're in the process of gathering data for a regional exploration or license application study and you are particularly interested in a certain stratigraphic interval, it is of great value to have a database at hand that tells you which of the wells in your study area penetrated this interval. This saves a lot of time selecting the wells for further consideration.
Part of the deliverables of the UKCS Regional Mapping project Lloyd's Register is working on for the Oil and Gas Authority is a set of so-called well penetration maps. This type of map will be available for each main stratigraphic interval, ranging from the Pliocene to Basement. For instance, the Upper Jurassic well penetration map shows all wells that either fully penetrated the Upper Jurassic , TD'd in the Upper Jurassic, TD'd in a stratigraphic level higher than Upper Jurassic or proved the Upper Jurassic is absent . Having such a dataset available for each stratigraphic interval enables the user to quickly filter all wells that fully penetrated the Upper Jurassic for instance.
The map below illustrates what the well penetration maps look like for the area east of the Halibut Horst in Quadrant 15. In this case, the Upper Jurassic well penetrations are superimposed onto the Upper Jurassic structural elements map, which is also a deliverable of the project. All exploration and appraisal wells have been used to populate the database, and as such the user can be confident that all relevant well data for a regional study have been incorporated.
Well penetration maps will soon be made available through the OGA website for the Central North Sea and the Moray Firth, thereby covering almost half of all exploration and appraisal wells in the UKCS. As the project evolves the remaining areas of the UKCS will be dealt with such that by 2019 these maps will be available across the whole of the UKCS.
Project overview:
Lloyd's Register secured two major UKCS projects with the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) for the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS), for the provision of Regional Exploration Maps and Regional and Field Support Engineering Services to help the OGA independently assess remaining undiscovered resources and improve geotechnical understanding. Full detail of the project win can be read here.
This is article five in a series of posts dedicated to our project for the OGA. Read the previous blog post.
Intervention Well Control Equipment (IWCE)