[Gazzatrone]

.Uganda saves us ....well for three days at best. Uganda oil discovery

[Eddie_lomax]

.......well for three days at best. Uganda oil discovery

Hurrah, looks like they're hit a positive bonanza of oil there, still according to their president it'll fund nigh on everything like increased investment in the country and "The government will also use some of the oil to produce electricity."

Excellent hey, just three things here that bother me, you don't burn light sweet stuff for electricity normally, African countries corruption is legendary so I expect the only change will be the density of black Mercedes S-class saloons crowding the dirt tracks, and theres barely any oil there. But apart from that it looks good

[nth]

Anyone know much about Uganda's oil infrastructure?

I believe the Albert Basin has just been discovered to contain significant large oil field. This country is landlock a la Chad.

[rockdoc123]

There is no current oil infrastructure. There has been some exploration over the past few years by a couple of companies, Hardman Resources is one from which have resulted a couple of recent oil discoveries. There has been mention of test rates from several zones in these wells (up to a couple of thousand barrels a day) but from what I've seen no real clue as to how big the discoveries might actually be. The reservoirs are Mio/Pliocene in age and sit on very, very young crystalline basement rock. The fact that Lake Albert sits above the active East African Rift system means that heat flow is very high which in turn allows for source rocks which are buried a relatively shallow depths to mature and supply hydrocarbons to the reservoirs. This is very early days in the exploration of this basin and I would not hazard to guess how big it might eventually be. What I will point out is that the discoveries are located in the NW corner of Uganda where it borders with Zaire and Sudan. The area has been host to lots and lots of tribal related conflict over the years. Given the remoteness I suspect you will need somewhere in the range of 400 - 500 MMB in order to make building a pipeline worthwhile.

[Doly]

Even so I find you a bit conservative and resistant to hysteria, when hysteria may be the appropriate reaction to what is going down around us.

Why is hysteria appropiate? How would it help?

[rockdoc123]

when hysteria may be the appropriate reaction to what is going down around us.

Rudyard Kipling said it best:

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; . . . If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same . . . Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it.

[seahorse2]

Rockdoc,

You forgot to close with the most important line of that poem, the very last line, which states "If" you can do all the above "You will be a man my son."

I read this poem to my kids often. Since I have two daughters, I substitute "man" with "person."

[nth]

Okay, sounds like it will be years before we know if there is enough oil to build the infrastructure.

Right now, only 30mb of proven by Hardman. It is not a simple structure. There are mixes of oil sand and shale in different intervals. Oil quality is sweet with API range 30-40. It seems like they have discover a nice small field with good quality oil. As the basin is quite large, they continue to test the boundaries of their find and found that it is not a continuous field.

Heritage has been more lucky and they have discovered a potentially better field further south. The test well yielded over 4kbpd. Estimated production will be 5kbpd. They believed this field is stretched over 70 sq km.

From the info I can gather, these wells are not easy to drill. If Heritage is successful, it will take them close to 60 days to drill one well.

To reach 500mb, we will need the other blocks to be drilled in my opinion. Anyone think 70 sq km can yield 500mb in the Albert Basin?

[rockdoc123]

To reach 500mb, we will need the other blocks to be drilled in my opinion. Anyone think 70 sq km can yield 500mb in the Albert Basin?

theoretically, and with a strong wind at your back it would be possible. Not knowing a lot about the reservoir a good guesstimate is to assume 200 barrels per acrefoot. For 500 MMB and 70 km2 that requires slightly over a 100 foot pay section which is not unusually thick. But given the type of depositional environment I think they must be looking at (the sandstone reservoir appears to sit unconformably on the basement suggesting it was deposited pre-rift and hence is likely fluvial) I would not think it would be isotropic across that whole area...but then I'm just guessing.

[nth]

theoretically, and with a strong wind at your back it would be possible. Not knowing a lot about the reservoir a good guesstimate is to assume 200 barrels per acrefoot. For 500 MMB and 70 km2 that requires slightly over a 100 foot pay section which is not unusually thick. But given the type of depositional environment I think they must be looking at (the sandstone reservoir appears to sit unconformably on the basement suggesting it was deposited pre-rift and hence is likely fluvial) I would not think it would be isotropic across that whole area...but then I'm just guessing.

If that is the case, then we will have better knowledge in 6 months.
The primary target is over 3km deep. Is that a misprint? The finds that Hardman was drilling are only a couple hundred meters deep. Heritage is looking quite deep.

[nth]

It is not sloppy as they have a disclaimer:

"Oil and gas fields have been discovered in other areas along the margins
of the continent and in interior rift systems, but those provinces were not assessed
at this time."

They only assessed major oil fields.

[copious.abundance]

Just so everyone knows that the Oil Megaprojects Wiki does not cover all future projects, I noticed there are no entries for Uganda on there at all.

>>> OGJ <<<

Heritage Oil to fast-track Uganda oil discoveries
Uchenna Izundu
OGJ International Editor

LONDON, Feb. 23 -- Heritage Oil Corp., Calgary, plans to bring its oil discoveries in the Lake Albert basin in Uganda on stream before 2015, a senior company official said.

The Buffalo-Giraffe complex on Block 1 is considered the largest onshore oil field in sub-Saharan Africa to have been discovered in the last 20 years, said Brian Smith, Heritage Oil's vice-president of exploration. The company is working with partner Tullow Oil Ltd. to put the discovery on a fast track. It said the block holds multibillion bbl of oil potential. "Sufficient oil reserves have been discovered in the Albert basin to exceed the commercial threshold for development," Smith said.

The partners plan to build a 500,000 b/d crude oil export pipeline from Block 1 to Mombasa on Kenya's East Coast. The line's cost is estimated at $1.5-2 billion. Analysis and development studies are under way on that project.

[...]

[copious.abundance]

This Ugandan play is starting to look reeeeally good.

>>> LINK <<<

Tullow claims ‘substantial’ find
May 06 2009

Energy play Tullow Oil says it has encountered ‘good-quality, oil-bearing reservoirs’ in Uganda’s Nsoga-1 exploration well.

The fully listed company says it drilled some 6 km horizontally from the top of the structure at Nsoga-1, in the Butaiba region of its Uganda Block 2, to a depth of 755 metres. The reservoir encountered is 43 metres thick, with the top three metres bearing oil.

Tullow maintains that ‘the entire reservoir should be oil-filled’, adding that a separate section above the reservoir showed oil-bearing sands ‘likely to have deeper oil water contacts’. Exploration director Angus McCoss declares, ‘We have made another substantial discovery in the important Victoria Nile Delta.’

Tullow has interests in three licences in the Lake Albert Rift Basin in Uganda. The company operates Block 2, of which it owns 100 per cent, and has 50 per cent of Blocks 1 and 3A.

[...]

[Ferretlover]

http://allafrica.com/stories/200906020555.html

Uganda's oil reserves could be as much as that of the Gulf countries, a senior official at the US Department of Energy has said.

Based on the test flow results encountered at the wells so far drilled and other oil numbers, Ms. Sally Kornfeld, a senior analyst in the office of fossil energy went ahead to talk about Uganda's oil reservoirs in the same sentence as Saudi Arabia.

[copious.abundance]

Uganda is a large new play opening up which I reported on here, but even I am very skeptical of this claim of rivaling-Saudi amounts.