Carnarvon Petroleum has provided an update on its subsurface work in the Buffalo project in WA-523-P.  The update follows those previously provided to ASX on 31 July 2017, 28 August 2017 and 5 September 2017.  

In its announcement of July 2017, Carnarvon said it had completed an extensive body of technical work around the Buffalo oil field and that there was strong evidence the original field development did not produce all of the economically recoverable oil. This was due to imperfect seismic imaging and mapping, which led to suboptimal well placement and significant areas of unswept oil. Of note, in 2004 those wells were still producing approx. 4,000 barrels of oil per day when production ceased.

In its announcement of August 2017, Carnarvon said the Buffalo field contains a best estimate resource (2C) of 31 million barrels of light premium oil, an that there is a range of options to redevelop the field and scoping studies show that the redevelopment of the Buffalo oil field is economic at current oil prices; even at the 1C outcome. This indicates the project to be low risk, and gave Carnarvon the confidence to advance the project immediately.

In its latest update, Carnarvon said quality new seismic data has recently been received and is showing increasingly clear definition around the important Elang formation, which is the producing reservoir in the Buffalo oil field. 

In the seismic image to the left, the top of the Elang formation has been marked and correlated with the Buffalo-5 well logs. This seismic image shows reservoir updip of the Buffalo-5 production well into an area Carnarvon expects will contain unproduced oil.  With this new data the reservoir in this region is clearly identifiable on seismic and has been reconciled with important well data within the oil field.

This improvement in data quality increases Carnarvon’s confidence in the redevelopment of the field. 

The above results have been possible due to significant increases in computing power since the field was last in production in 2004. Carnarvon has been working in concert with the seismic reprocessing firm, DownUnder GeoSolutions, to achieve the current results.

Carnarvon secured the Buffalo project in 2016 with the objective of running modern seismic technologies (called Full Waveform Inversion or FWI) to determine whether seismic velocity issues in the past could be solved with this new technology. The first iteration appeared to successfully achieve this objective and a second reprocessing iteration was undertaken as an independent check of the initial reprocessing work. All of the learnings from the first two reprocessing iterations were then incorporated into this current third reprocessing iteration. The result is a data set that is a vast improvement on the historic seismic data that was available when the field was last in production. At this stage the Carnarvon team believe the current data set is sufficient to take this project forward to drilling and development.

In addition to the work being undertaken around the Buffalo oil field, the Carnarvon team are also mapping the untapped exploration prospects within the permit. A separate update will be provided once this work is complete.