Repost from another board !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SEUSF
Post# of 123651
Re::Geoman2 is correct.
From my working field experience, all DST's offshore are through cased hole perfs. Not good oil field practice to run open hole dst's offshore and all the regulatory authorities I know will not allow offshore open hole DST's. Too difficult to control open hole well if things go wrong during testing.
The GALP release indicate that GALP will drill stem test or more correctly production test Mopane-1X to confirm the real life potential flow rates from the indicated light oil reservoir zones.
The wireline tools GALP have already run in the open hole of Mopane-1X, like MDT (effectively a mini downhole drill stem test) or whatever the service company calls it, will already provide a good estimate of the expected intial flow rate for the cased hole DST. The wireline recovered samples will provide a good indication of the nature of the oil and gas they expect to see on the cased hole production test.
The production test is usually over several days and will investigate such parameters as radius of drainage, decline rate if see any, transients etc., to determine commerciality.
If Mopane -2X is a discovery in the same zone/s as Mopane-1X, the operator may even install remote downhole sensors in that well to test for connection between the Mopane wells to collect additional pressure data and all the other stuff that reservoir engineers like to see.
As a geo, I am intrigued by the mysterious comment by GALP in their first 'discovery release' that the Mopane-1X discovery has opened up a new model for light oil and gas accumualtions in the Cretaceous of the Offshore Orange Basin. We await further information from GALP other than 'monster of a discovery' comments that have been circualting.
Interesting times ahead for GALP and Sintana shareholders and great to see any explorer make a significant discovery, especially on their first exploratory well. This is not often the case!
jmho