PXP Energy, partners to start Peru oil drilling

Listed upstream oil and gas firm PXP Energy Corp. and its partners will start drilling a well in the Peru oil prospect in the first quarter of next year.

In a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange yesterday, PXP Energy said its partner Karoon Gas Australia Ltd. signed binding agreements with Stena Drilling Ltd and Tullow Oil Ltd. to contract the “Stena Forth” Dynamically Positioned Drillship.

The “Stena Forth” was contracted to drill one well to be called the Marina-1 exploration well in Block Z-38 in the Tumbes Basin in Peru in early 2020.

The Marina-1 well sits in water depth of approximately 350 meters. It is targeting a gross prospective resource of 256 million barrels.

According to the Australian firm, there is potential for a derisking of a list of additional prospects in the block totaling over a billion barrels of prospective resource on a gross basis.

“The drilling of Marina-1 is a critical milestone for assessing the prospectivity of the deeper waters off northern Peru, and, on success, could derisk several further exploration targets within Block Z-38, and Karoon’s 100 percent owned Area 73 Technical Evaluation Area, potentially providing important future production for Peru,” Karoon managing director Robert Hosking said in a statement.

Block Z-38 sits in the heart of the Tumbes Basin, adjacent to the prolific oil producing Talara Basin which has produced 1.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) since 1880.

The Tumbes Basin has a proven working petroleum system and evidence suggests the prospects in Z-38 are accessing the same source rocks as the giant onshore Talara Basin fields.

Karoon Gas Australia owns 40 percent of Block Z-38 through KEI (Peru Z38) Pty Ltd. Sucursal del Peru, UK-listed oil explorer Tullow Oil with a 35 percent interest and Pitkin Petroleum Peru Z-38 SRL with 25 percent.