Columbia-focused oil and gas business Amerisur Resources (LSE:AMER) advanced 0.5pc to 11.8p today after confirming plans to spud the next well in its 2018/19 drilling programme later this month.
In an operational update, the firm said the operator of its 30pc-owned CPO-5 field has told it a rig is preparing to drill the well – called Indico-1 – in the ‘latter half of October’. Indico-1 is targeting the same play as CPO-5’s Mariposa-1 well, which produced its one-millionth barrel last week. The well has P50 recoverable resource of 10.3MMbo gross.
Following Indico-1, CPO-5’s operator expects to drill a further two exploration wells before year-end called Aguila-1 and Sol-1, targeting 2.7MMbo and 4MMbo respectively. As previously announced, the business also plans to drill two wells at its 100pc-owned Putumayo-8 site before the beginning of 2019, targeting 5.6MMbo.
When we spoke to Amerisur’s chief financial officer Nick Harrison earlier this month, he told us the firm has all the necessary environmental approvals in place to start work at Putumayo-8. However, it had yet to get permission to drill the wells from an adjacent pad called Cohembi 2, which the prospect borders. Harrison told us he was confident that this would not be an issue: ‘We expect to get these approvals over the coming weeks. The first drill will determine if the second is drilled from the same pad or on the block itself.’
Next year will see Amerisur drill three wells at another field called Putumayo-9 targeting37.8MMboe. Then it will move to a final field called Putumayo-12, where it will target 71.56MMboe across three wells.
Elsewhere in today’s update, Amerisur said testing of the T sands at its 100pc-owned Platanillo block is continuing at varying levels of production. The firm found a hydrocarbon-bearing reservoir at the sands last month during the drilling of its Pintadillo-1 well.
It made the T Sands discovery after Pintadillo-1 failed to find hydrocarbons at the N sand anomaly on the Platanillo Block, where it was targeting resources of 11.44MMbo. Although the N Sands failure initially hit Amerisur’s share price by c.20pc, the firm made a partial recovery several days later when it announced that the T sands has flow tested under natural flow at 590 bopd.
Amerisur said today that initial results indicate the well is located low on the T sands structure. It will now complete re-mapping of the discovery over the next four weeks before deciding whether to fully appraise the find.
Finally, Amerisur said output from its two producing fields – Platanillo and CPO-5 – came in at 149,22bbls over September. Average daily production was 4,974bopd over the period, with peak daily production of 5,025bopd.