Lukoil begins drilling several Caspian Sea prospects

Russian oil and gas company Lukoil has started drilling several prospects in the northern part of the Caspian sea.

Lukoil said on Monday that it started drilling an exploration well at the Shirotno-Rakushechnaya prospect located north of the V.I. Grayfer field.

The well, with the target depth of 1,650 meters, was drilled from the Astra jack-up drilling rig. The rig is designed for shallow waters and the sea at the point of the well is 4.5 meters deep.

The company added that the same structural tectonic zone featured the Yury Korchagin, Valery Grayfer and Vladimir Filanovsky fields, discovered in 2000, 2001, and 2005 respectively.

Lukoil also began studying the Khazri and Titonskaya features of a new block in the south of the same sea area within the East Sulaksky bank and is currently drilling the second well to the target depth of 5,200 thousand meters.

The sea is 45 meters deep at the point of the well. Khazri was drilled from the Neptune jack-up rig and the well will explore for oil and gas deposits in terrigenous and carbonate sediments of the Jurassic-Cretaceous period.

As part of its drilling campaign for Caspian fields, Lukoil is constructing the sixth well at the riser block platform at the Yury Korchagin field.

The well will also include the MultiNode intelligent completion system and the length of the borehole of this horizontally directed producing well is 5,164.8 meters.

The Mercury jack-up rig is in charge of drilling. The well’s daily target production rate of 348 metric tons will allow stabilizing the field’s production.

Last month, Lukoil completed the installation of a jacket for an accommodation platform topside at the V.I. Grayfer field in the Caspian Sea.

The field is named after Lukoil’s recently deceased chairman and “founding father” of the Soviet oil industry Valery Isaakovich Grayfer.

Grayfer died only days later following the launch of the jacket. He was a man with a rare distinction of having an oil field named after him while he was still alive.

The northern area of the Caspian Sea has been under exploration by Lukoil since 1995.

The company started deep drilling in 1999. The company drilled twenty-six prospecting and appraisal wells at the license areas.

Either independently or as a party to joint ventures, Lukoil discovered ten fields in the Caspian Sea with C1+C2 ultimate recoverable reserves of hydrocarbons amounting to 7 billion barrels of oil equivalent.

Six of these ten fields – V. Filanovsky, Y. Korchagin, Sarmatskoe, Khvalynskoye, V. I. Grayfer, and ‘170 km’ – are major multi-pay fields.