Gulf of Mexico operator W&T Offshore believes it may have as much as 100 million barrels of additional reserves at its legacy Mahogany Field off the coast of Louisiana than is currently on the books.
Founder and CEO Tracy Krohn told the Enercom Oil & Gas Conference that W&T, a Houston firm that operates in both shallow and deep waters of 560 feet to 7,100 feet—mostly offshore Louisiana—has “substantially” expanded Mahogany’s size and depth since 2011 by drilling and sidetracking new producing locations, S&P Global Platts reports.
“I believe we’re siting on 100 million barrels of additional reserves that have not been booked as proved,” he said. Those volumes are more than the 33.6 million of proved reserves currently.
W&T has kept to a strategy for the past 30 or 35 years of acquiring older fields at relatively inexpensive prices, reprocessing seismic and applying new technology to eke more oil and gas from them.
According to S&P Global Platts, Mahogany was the first commercial subsalt field in the shallow-water Gulf of Mexico, discovered in 1993 by a consortium of Phillips Petroleum (which has since merged into ConocoPhillips), Amoco (since merged into BP) and Anadarko Petroleum, which was acquired last week by Occidental Petroleum.
In addition to Mahogany, W&T has a lineup of other Gulf projects. It recently made a discovery at Gladden Deep, a field off Louisiana’s “big toe” in 3,000 feet of water. It should begin production late this year.
