After testing was conducted by the drill ship Stena IceMax, the Monterey Jack well site is going to be permanently capped. (Contributed)
JAMES RISDON: 13 Jan 2017
Drilling has wrapped up at Shell Canada’s Monterey Jack exploratory well site in the Shelburne Basin.
“(Shell Canada is) now taking steps to permanently seal the well in accordance with the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board’s regulatory requirements,” Cameron Yost, a spokesman for the oil company, said in an interview Friday.
“This involves the installation and testing of multiple barriers in the wellbore,” he said.
Although the drilling work was completed Thursday, Shell Canada won’t know the results of that exploratory program until its personnel has analyzed its data.
Crews aboard the Stena IceMax drillship started work at the Monterey Jack site on Sept. 25, roughly a week after wrapping up work at another site in the Shelburne basin, the Cheshire exploratory well, about 250 km south of Halifax.
The Cheshire well was capped in mid-September after drilling there failed to turn up commercially-viable quantities of hydrocarbons.
The Monterey Jack well site is about 120km southwest of Cheshire, an area where the ocean floor is structurally different.
Shell Canada undertook the Shelburne Basin Offshore Exploration Drilling Project because the region’s resource potential is still largely unknown, said Yost in September last year.
The oil company already has the operations authorization it needs to drill up to seven wells in the Shelburne Basin.
That means Shell Canada could still save up to two years on the time it would need to get approval to drill an additional five exploratory wells, said an official with the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board last year.
Shell Canada is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Netherlands-based Royal Dutch Shell and primarily trades on the London Stock Exchange.
RELATED:
- Shell gets go-ahead for second offshore N.S. well
- Close call for Shell Canada: Pipes dumped in stormy seas almost struck oil well
- Shelburne Basin well a bust for Shell Canada
- Shell hires drill ship for 2015 exploration off Nova Scotia
- Pipe breaks on Nova Scotia drilling rig, falls to ocean floor