Renergen, the helium and methane mining company, said yesterday it had achieved early success in its recently commenced production drilling campaign for feed to Phase 1 of its Virginia Gas Project.
The first two wells in the campaign had flowed initial gas – the gas composition had yet to be determined.
In addition, the previously reported R2D2 well had, following clean-up operations, increased its flow rate by 18 000 standard cubic feet, or 15 percent since the well was first completed.
Frodo, the first of two new wells drilled since R2D2 and C3PO, was drilled to target depth within 10 days and struck gas early with a flow rate of 23 000 standard cubic feet per day.
Balrog, the second well drilled, struck gas last weekend. The flow rate through a diverter was recording 90 000 standard cubic feet per day, indicating potentially higher stabilised flow following clean-up.
Drilling is not yet complete, and there was still some way to go before reaching target depth, Renergen said in a statement.
The two new wells were sited using different exploration techniques as a guide for future planning purposes. Frodo was sited using only the latest fault structure interpretation, while Balrog was sited using Renergen’s “conviction scoring” AI methodology, based on biological (vegetation stress) markers with no other geological input.
“Whilst a sample of two is hardly conclusive, since deploying the conviction tool we developed, the drilling success rate has significantly improved. Since we started drilling, we have only had a single drilling failure. We are excited to see the results of what the drilling campaign looks like once we have over-layed the machine learning algorithm to the dataset,” said CEO Stefano Marani.
Helium had been detected in both wells, and samples would be despatched for full composition analysis when the drilling was complete and flow rates had stabilised.