RE: My take!15 Apr 2025 12:29
Paul Baay provided information about drilling in his interview with the Discord group. It’s available for all shareholders to read. Here’s the relevant part:
JB: What lessons has TXP learned from the recent drilling setbacks?
PB: You know, we've probably had issues on quite a few wells. Obviously, the last one with CAS-4, with the pump issue and, you know... We could probably spend a couple of hours on this.
I think the thing that we've really learned in the last six months is we're not special. BP lost two of their wells offshore. Heritage had three sidetracks for one of their wells at Penal Barrackpore. They lost a well last month just to the west of us, four miles.
PB: I know we kind of look at it and say we should be able to bang these down. We've got to find a better way. We tried to go with this cheaper water system that would save us a million dollars. As it turned out, we couldn't get any penetration rate.
We were drilling five feet an hour. It would have taken us five months to drill the wells. So we've got to switch over. And quite frankly, the rig's been working great since we brought the new pump in. It's state of the art. It's been working fantastic.
PB: I think what we've got to do is we need to drill enough wells back-to-back to kind of get everything running smooth. As everybody knows, we've been drilling one well, then we take a break. Then we drill a couple of wells, then we take a break.
What we really need to do is get ourselves in a position where we can do four or five of these in a row. Then I think we'll really get some of the economy to scale.
PB: We traded out some personnel. James made the decision to wait for the new pump, which was absolutely the right thing to do. We tried to go with a cheaper water system because Flambeau Jay said it would work better. It didn’t work with ship.
It’s going to be a bit of a learning game. We’re getting closer.
JB: Some of the posters have pointed out — could it be the vendor, the process, or execution that needs changing since recent failures? It seems to be the same drilling rig & team that goes wrong, etc.
PB: My answer to you would be this. I think if you were trying to sum it up for the posters: the equipment is working perfectly well now, even this pressurized drilling and everything else.
We’ve answered the equipment question. What we're now trying to figure out is how we deal with the rocks that we're drilling — going through the different formations. That's the trick.
We still haven’t cracked that one. Quite frankly, nobody on the island has cracked it. But we need to. We're not going to give up.
JB: There's some new equipment you brought in that's going to hopefully help?
PB: It worked perfect. In this last well, when we decided to switch from water to oil, we didn't get stuck. We didn’t leave tools down the hole. We made an economic decision — it would have taken us forever to drill with the water system. So we shut the rig down, brough
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