Rejuvenation of a Shallow Reservoir in the Seventy-Year-Old Golden Meadow Field, Lafourche Parish, Louisiana

Apache Corporation recently completed two successful horizontal oil wells in the 2,700' sand on the south flank of Golden Meadow Field. This is remarkable for a reservoir that has had ninety-three completions since it was discovered seventy years ago and was considered to have been watered-out since the early 1980s. Subsurface analysis suggests the 2,700' sand was deposited in a shallow water bay-type delta during the Middle Pleistocene. Three distinct sedimentary environments have been identified: distributary mouth bars, channel-fills, and interdistributary crevasse-splays. An amplitude extraction on the 2,700' sand indicates that amplitudes generally correspond to thicker well-developed distributary mouth bar sands. Discontinuities in the reservoir do not appear to have affected uniform drainage of the oil column. The original oil-water contact of -2,683' has moved up-dip to its highest level of -2,653', as the result of the drilling program initiated by Texaco from the early 1940s through the late 1970s. The reservoir produced 11.7 MMBO, but recent drilling indicates the oil-water level has not moved significantly since the late 1970s. Vertical wells that have been drilled into the reservoir have experienced coning, which caused most of them to prematurely water-out. Three pilot holes drilled by Apache in late 2007 resulted in the drilling of two very successful horizontal wells. Ten more horizontal wells will be drilled in this reservoir in 2008.