Edison Lobao: ExxonMobil drilled in the wrong spot.
'Guarani well drilled in wrong spot'
The Guarani well, which was drilled by US supermajor ExxonMobil in Brazil's pre-salt fairway and came up dry, was spudded "in the wrong place” Brazilian Energy Minister Edison Lobao has claimed.
State-run Petrobras recommended the Guarani well be drilled in a different location, Lobao said today in an interview in Brasilia.
“The dry well occurred because they drilled in the wrong place. It was a mistake,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg. “There is no risk with the pre-salt.”
ExxonMobil failed to find oil or natural gas in the offshore Guarani well in the offshore BM-S-22 Block.
Nelson Narciso Filho, director of Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency, said on 14 June that the dry well was a “one-off.”
“We are working with Petrobras and Hess to evaluate the results of the BM-S-22 drilling programme in order to plan a location of a third well to help us further evaluate the BM-S- 22 block,” Patrick McGinn, a spokesman for ExxonMobil’s Houston-based exploration business, told Bloomberg today.
The pre-salt area runs 800 kilometres along Brazil’s coast and has oil deposits beneath a layer of salt resting as much as 3000 metres beneath the ocean surface and another 3000 to 5000 metres below the seabed.
Petrobras is developing the Tupi field in the pre-salt region, the largest oil discovery in the Americas since 1976, with UK gas giant BG Group and Portugal’s Galp Energia.
“Petrobras will not comment the subject because it is not the operator of the block BM-S-22,” the company told Bloomberg in an emailed response to questions about Lobao’s remarks.