It’s mixed bag as Tullow finds fresh oil deposits, dry well in Turkana

By Macharia Kamau

British oil explorer, Tullow has announced a mixed bag in its exploration work in Turkana, with one of the wells encountering substantial oil resources while another almost dry well.

The firm yesterday said it had encountered a cumulative 62m of oil resources in a well secondary to Twiga 2 well that it started drilling February. It, however, found an almost dry well in Ekunyuk 1, where it found just five metres of net oil pay in the well drilled to a depth of 1,800 metres.

The well secondary to Twiga 2 - or a sidetrack – was drilled after the primary Twiga 2 encountered 18m of oil net pay and evidence showed that it had limited oil resources. The firm made a decision to drill a sidetrack due to promising potential in the area. The Twiga-2 sidetrack encounters 62 metres of net oil pay. It said the well would be deepened and evaluated further.

“The initial wellbore was drilled near the basin bounding fault and encountered some 18m of net oil pay within alluvial fan facies, with limited reservoir quality. A decision was therefore made to side track the well away from the fault to explore north of Twiga-1 and some 62 metres of vertical net oil pay has been discovered in the Auwerwer formation, similar in quality to the initial Twiga-1 discovery,” said Tullow in a statement released yesterday.

“The well is currently being deepened to evaluate the Lower Lokhone potential and a testing program for this successful well is planned to be conducted later this year.”

Tullow is a 50 per cent owner of the Blocks 10BB and 10T in Northern Kenya where it has been exploring for oil and made some major discoveries since March 2012, when it announced that it had encountered substantial resources after drilling the Ngamia 1 well.

The firm is also the operator of the two blocks, which are 50 per cent owned by Canadian firm Africa Oil.

Recent estimates by the two firms said there could be about 600 million barrels of oil in the areas they are exploring and around Turkana.