Having secured the necessary permits, the company’s wholly-owned subsidiary Independent Energy Solutions has begun civil works for the preparation of the Fiume Bruna 2 well site, which marks the official start of drilling operations on this site, the company said.
According to the company the drilling rig has been contracted and will be re-entering and testing a 344m deep borehole previously named Pietra 1, a pre-license stratigraphic well which identified a single seam of gas-active coal and shale approximately seven metres thick. The main purpose of this operation is to evaluate the means to undertake production testing so as to determine gas and any water flow rates from the gas saturated coal and shale in place. Once site preparation has been completed, drilling operations are expected to last for two weeks.
The company said that approximately 66 km of 2D seismic data have been acquired to date over a representative portion of the coal basin to determine the geometry of the coal seam away from the former mining area. This includes the portion shot prior to drilling last year which has since been reprocessed. A regional depositional model has been constructed from the reinterpretation of the stratigraphy of a large number of vintage boreholes, leading to the discovery of a variably thick gas-bearing carbonaceous shale sequence consistently located immediately above and below the coal seam.
Grayson Nash, chairman of Independent Resources, said: “Fiume Bruna has thrown up a few challenges, not least the discovery in August last year of a thick evaporitic sequence in the deeper part of the basin. This, combined with some bureaucratic procedures and a period of locally heavy rain, has slowed us down. But we now look forward to producing gas and proving this large resource. In addition, our discovery of gas shale in this basin, whose extent we hope to confirm soon, is something we look forward to testing over the next few months.”
