Touch­stone Ex­plo­ration yes­ter­day an­nounced the com­ple­tion of flow­back test­ing of the Cas­cadu­ra Deep-1 well, con­firm­ing a liq­uids rich nat­ur­al gas dis­cov­ery.

Touch­stone has an 80 per cent op­er­at­ing work­ing in­ter­est in the well, which is lo­cat­ed on the Or­toire block on­shore Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed holds the re­main­ing 20 per cent work­ing in­ter­est.

Touch­stone’s Pres­i­dent and Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer Paul Baay said the pos­i­tive test re­sults from Cas­cadu­ra Deep-1 fur­ther ex­pands the op­por­tu­ni­ty on the Or­toire block “as we now ex­pect to have two dis­tinct and sep­a­rate sheets pro­duc­ing from two wells in the Cas­cadu­ra struc­ture.”

“We will ac­cel­er­ate op­er­a­tions re­quired to bring the two Cas­cadu­ra wells on­to pro­duc­tion as the test re­sults al­low us to prop­er­ly size sur­face fa­cil­i­ties for reser­voir man­age­ment.

“We are al­so mov­ing for­ward with the re­quired ap­pli­ca­tions to es­tab­lish a sec­ond Cas­cadu­ra sur­face lo­ca­tion, de­signed for up to four de­vel­op­ment wells. The test re­sults demon­strate the clear fu­ture pro­duc­tion op­por­tu­ni­ties for the Com­pa­ny,” Baay said.

Ac­cord­ing to Touch­stone, Cas­cadu­ra Deep-1 well pro­duc­tion test­ing com­menced on April 8, 2021, with flow tests span­ning a to­tal of 58 hours, com­prised of an ini­tial clean-up flow pe­ri­od, fol­lowed by an ini­tial shut-in pe­ri­od and a five-step rate test, in­clud­ing a 24-hour ex­tend­ed flow test. Well test­ing was con­duct­ed by an in­ter­na­tion­al well test­ing and mea­sure­ment com­pa­ny.

Dur­ing the ex­tend­ed flow test pe­ri­od, the well achieved a peak pro­duc­tion rate of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 4,567 bar­rels of oil equiv­a­lent per day (90 per cent nat­ur­al gas).

The well is cur­rent­ly shut-in for an ex­tend­ed pres­sure build-up sur­vey for a min­i­mum of four weeks to iden­ti­fy pos­si­ble for­ma­tion bound­aries. Touch­stone will not con­duct fur­ther test­ing of the well and in­tends pro­duc­ing the well con­cur­rent­ly with Cas­cadu­ra-1ST1.

Touch­stone’s Chief Op­er­at­ing Of­fi­cer James Ship­ka said the ex­cep­tion­al per­for­mance seen dur­ing Cas­cadu­ra Deep-1 well test­ing “re­in­forces the ge­o­log­i­cal con­cept of mul­ti­ple stacked, in­de­pen­dent hy­dro­car­bon charged hori­zons in the Her­rera tur­bidite fair­way.”

“We will not be con­duct­ing any up-hole test­ing in the well as we do not want to in­ter­rupt this in­ter­val at the risk of dam­ag­ing the reser­voir with wa­ter-based flu­ids.

The da­ta col­lect­ed in this flow test in­di­cates that sheet four is sep­a­rate from sheet three, where pro­duc­tion is ex­pect­ed from the Cas­cadu­ra-1ST1 well.

There re­mains an ad­di­tion­al 558 feet of po­ten­tial pay above the test­ed zone in sheet three which can be eval­u­at­ed in fu­ture de­vel­op­ment wells,” Ship­ka said.