Last week Hess announced the successful oil discovery results from the 100% Hess-operated Pickerel-1 well in the Gulf of Mexico during the company’s second-quarter earnings call. The exploration well is located in Mississippi Canyon (MC) Block 727 and will be tied back to the Tubular Bells production platform in MC Block 724. Although the company did not provide detailed information about the recent discovery, it revealed that the Pickerel-1 encountered approximately 90 feet of net pay in a high-quality, oil-bearing, Miocene-aged reservoir. The well is expected to start oil production by the middle of 2024.

According to TGS Well Data Analytics, Hess ranks as the third largest producer in the area with an approximate gross production of 16,700 boepd after Chevron and OXY. The company noted net production of 32,000 boepd in the entire Gulf of Mexico, compared with 29,000 boepd in the prior year during the call.

Greg Hill, Hess COO, cited two main groundbreaking technologies as helping to offset the risk of exploration projects in the GoM: 
“The first one is Ocean Bottom Nodes (OBN). So we are shooting OBN surveys in and around all of our hubs. And that is coupled with the new algorithms, so Full Waveform Inversion (FWI). Combining those two allows us to see new opportunities in subsalt in the Gulf of Mexico.” TGS is the technology leader in Ocean Bottom Node (OBN) innovation and offers a wide range of deployment solutions to improve project efficiency. TGS also employs Dynamic Matching FWI to improve imaging quality in mature areas such as the GoM. 

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