Deepwater Tornado well pays off for Talos

Oil and gas company Talos Energy has completed drilling operations on the Tornado 3 sidetrack well (Tornado Attic well), located in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, which successfully discovered pay in line with pre-drill expectations.

Talos holds a 65 per cent working interest in the Tornado field and is the operator with Kosmos Energy also holding a 35 per cent working interest.

As previously reported, Talos Energy hired the West Neptune drillship from Seadrill for the Tornado well.

The Tornado Attic well was designed to optimize recovery and was drilled approximately 4,500 feet from the Tornado waterflood injection well and 1,550 feet away from the closest existing producer well, Talos said on Thursday.

The well encountered approximately 85 gross (63 net) feet of true vertical thickness pay in the B6 Upper Zone with rock properties and reservoir consistent with internal modelling and pre-drill expectations. The company will immediately move to the completion phase.

As a result of the existing infrastructure in place and accelerated completion timeline, production is expected by the third quarter of 2021, ahead of initial expectations. Talos previously expected the production from the well sometime in the third quarter of 2021.

The company expects the Attic Well to produce approximately 8-10 thousand barrels of oil equivalent per day (MBoe/d) gross (approximately 80 per cent oil) once online.

The Tornado field was discovered in 2016 and is located approximately three miles south of the company’s Phoenix complex, which was acquired in 2013 and utilizes the HP-I floating production facility. To date, the Tornado field has produced approximately 34 million barrels of oil equivalent (MMBoe) gross, approximately 80 per cent of which is oil.

In 2020, Talos initiated the intra-well waterflood project, drilling an injection well which sources water from a large aquifer above the producing B-6 Sand. Known as a “dump flood”, the project is one of the first of its kind in a subsea, deepwater environment.

The higher pressured aquifer naturally injects over 20,000 barrels of water a day into the lower pressured producing reservoir at the downdip boundary of the geological formation, creating reservoir energy to help maintain production and increase ultimate recovery throughout the Tornado field.

Talos President and Chief Executive Officer, Timothy S. Duncan, commented: “We are pleased to announce success with our latest Tornado well, which will optimize recovery from the field and builds on the success of the recent waterflood project where our multi-disciplinary team has done a fantastic job.

“More broadly, this success highlights our diversity of project inventory, spanning a wide range of target sizes, risk profiles and turnaround times to first production by utilizing infrastructure in place. We look forward to bringing this well online ahead of schedule and to adding production from our prolific Tornado field, which has been a steady, material contributor to our company’s success since it was discovered over five years ago”.