Speaker 1:

(music) [foreign language]. It is a high-risk business. It's not as high-risk as roulette.

Some people will look at statistics of a region and say, "One in eight." Some people will look at global statistics and say to you, "It is 1/15." But basically like in roulette your chances of encountering success or failure is one in two every time you throw a dice. You can throw the dice to 50 times and it doesn't come in. You can throw it first time or second time and it comes in.

Jim Webb:

(music) I think the worldwide statistics are that only one will in 50 finds commercial hydrocarbon.

Speaker 3:

[inaudible].

Jim Webb:

I would say your chances at establishing commercial hydrocarbons with your first well are probably nearer to one in 100.

Speaker 3:

[inaudible].

Jim Webb:

But as an Israeli said, "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics."

Issam El-Malazi:

With [inaudible] there, it's a big moment for everybody. As a rule of thumb, from the moment you think about an area as an area with a possible oil potential, until you discover in it, 10 years can be silly lapse.

The kind of environment you'd find the oil [inaudible] is not a friendly environment. It can be an arctic, or shellac, desert, or swamp.

Abdellah Bouhou:

[inaudible] yesterday. And I'm going to speak to the tribesmen about the progresses [inaudible]. I'm to prepare everything for spotting to work. Maybe it would take them about four days more.

Jim Webb:

A wildcat well is a well drilled in an area where vere few or no other wells have ever been drilled before. So the result of the well are not easily predictable. Delta was a rank wildcat. Nobody had ever before drilled for the [inaudible] in this part of the element.

Speaker 1:

It is a challenging business, it keeps the adrenaline high. You generally find people in this line of business who do not shy away from difficult undertaking, and a risky undertaking.

Speaker 6:

(music) [foreign language].

Jim Webb:

We know there's oil about in this neck of the woods, we've seen it in the offshore wells, we've seen it seeping to surface on the south peninsula. So we don't know until we drill, but it has to be drilled.

Speaker 1:

There's a great difference between an expression well and a development well. And expression well is a well which you drill in order to find out if there is oil, and even if there's oil there you don't know what quantity, what quality.

Speaker 7:

Fine. I'm going to take Neil up on [inaudible] what's going on. [inaudible] I'm thinking.

Abdellah Bouhou:

Okay. And here we come. We can't have this track, this four tracks that we have stuck here. We can't have him because the forklift is done. He's [crosstalk]-

Speaker 1:

This single operation is monitored in detail. There are marks, data sheet, reports where everything is documented by the hour.

Speaker 9:

Okay, [foreign language].

Jim Webb:

Abdellah Bouhoun was the company engineer on the two wells. A young gent from Algeria. Very good guy, highly educated, very practical, very decisive. A good man to have around.

Speaker 1:

Was a very competent, daring engineer who knew his stuff and who contributed very valuable advice and deeds to be Jim where primarily in charge of the ... But he was standing there to add to their expertise. And he was our man.

Abdellah Bouhou:

One [kesig], it was about $800 to $900. He was hammering the tread to take out the protecting. And the tread, it's the weak point for the casing. It is the [inaudible] that much. A good way to work like that.

How they prepare to spot the oil, they check this pump house to take the mat [inaudible] to the shell shaker. This pan, this washer pan. And they check the pan, after that, when they finish repairing the line for [inaudible] service we start spotting ... We start drilling.

Speaker 10:

[foreign language].

Abdellah Bouhou:

(silence) Me to seal like that from here to there. Protect the casing and the [inaudible] out like that, it's risky. Too much risky.

(silence) [foreign language]. Walls fell apart. If it was me, I sent it back. I don't [inaudible] did it at all.

Speaker 11:

[inaudible] first time, we did it at all-

Abdellah Bouhou:

No, no, no. Please, please, please, please. It's not a job, this one. Go ahead and take it for anybody.

Issam El-Malazi:

This is the nature of this business. Tension, frustration.

Abdellah Bouhou:

It was difficult to unload it. I tell him if it is not safety to load it, don't load it. The trucking company take their responsibility from that. They should load it very good. What they do, they try it from here to here. They cut the [inaudible] and [inaudible] take them down.

Speaker 12:

[inaudible].

Speaker 1:

While it helps to have a sense of humour and it helps to have patience. And these two, that's what [inaudible] had. These various service companies are all specialists. They're the best in their line, okay. But expert to a degree. But they concentrate on their angle and there is required a person who has a wide angle and who make all these experts put together and this one's Ali.

Ali Abdullhack:

Okay, what I want to say is-

Speaker 1:

He would hold a meeting with the various specialists, a daily meeting where everybody's informed of what goes on and everybody listens to what the other has to say and benefits from each other's knowledge.

Ali Abdullhack:

Okay, from time to times there will be som dispute, some different opinions. Whatever. We'll sit together, discuss the problem, and find the best solution. But I'm sure we will.

Speaker 1:

We had several service contractors. The main drilling contractor BGN, but we also had the mud company, provided mud engineering and mud chemicals. We had the well site man who was describing ecological findings on the well. We had geo services company who was monitoring the mud and the drilling progress. We had Schlumberger providing cementing services, wire line services, and providing certain tools. We had a catering company. These would be best launch when well coordinated. We can try to direct people from a town office, from a head office, but you cannot be sure that they will turn all in the same direction. Ali was there to make them turn in same direction. And he did an excellent job.

Stuart Lacey:

We're actually at a depth of 400, roughly 400, metres. And we're trying to get to about 600 metres where we'll find a good spot to stop drilling and run the casing.

Jim Webb:

All around, I would say Stuart was a very good man to have on board.

Stuart Lacey:

So we haven't got far to go, only 200 metres, which could be done in as little as five or six hours. After that, we'll run some wire line logs, some electric logs, to try and give us some data on the hole. And get all that sewn up, run the casing, and then continue drilling.

Jim Webb:

He also had a bit more than a lot of well site geologists do in terms of interpretive ability and wishing to actually give us more insight into the rocks than just describing what was there.

Stuart Lacey:

Time for a bit of geology. This is a sort of section through the earth taken with shock waves to get reflections off the different beds of rock. At the moment, we're about here and we're going to go down into this section here. Now this is a slightly strange bit of seismic section. What is probably is is anhydrite, which is a kind of evaporate I guess. A bit like salt. And that may give us a big reflection like this. But what it may be, and what we're hoping it will be, is oil or gas. I mean, that can give us the same kind of reflection. So that's a possibility. And then we carry on after that all the way into here. And we really don't know what this is at all. You can probably see up here we have some quite nice lines, down here it's all a bit of a mess. So we're not sure, but we shall see. Time will tell.

Speaker 15:

[foreign language].

Speaker 16:

[foreign language].

Abdellah Bouhou:

Everything it would be easy if they know their job. They're not very good at job.

Speaker 15:

Thank you.

Abdellah Bouhou:

Thank you very much.

Speaker 16:

[foreign language].

Speaker 1:

It is interesting, you have many nationalities there. You have many people coming from different background and they are all dedicated, otherwise they wouldn't be there in the first place. Some comradery develops. You see heroic acts sometimes.

Stuart Lacey:

(silence) We're standing here in the main water reserve pit for the rig, and it's empty. And we're not drilling as a result. We stopped at midnight last night because we ran out of water, despite it raining most of yesterday and most of the day before. And until we get some water, we can't drill anymore. So we're snookered at the moment, basically.

Speaker 1:

Of course I wasn't pleased when I heard about it. It is not common to encounter such a situation.

Issam El-Malazi:

Because I have my budget here and I have a responsibility for this budget, yeah. And every day delays it costs me money for nothing.

Stuart Lacey:

There's absolutely loads of it just below our feet in the ground water. So we only the need to pump it out from this bedouin water well, which means repairing their pump. I don't know if we can do this, I don't know if BGM can do this. I doubt BGM can do it because it's not their pump.

This big one, with the red stipe, is that a water tank?

Abdellah Bouhou:

Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Stuart Lacey:

It is.

Abdellah Bouhou:

It is.

Stuart Lacey:

Because the guy is just sitting there. They're not doing anything.

Abdellah Bouhou:

But they only have one truck.

Stuart Lacey:

I need one water truck.

Abdellah Bouhou:

Only one. They should have about four or five water track all the time, [inaudible] working.

Speaker 17:

I think we're looking at something like $14,000 a day for the drilling and probably looking at another 11 to $12,000 a day in service company contracts. So it can be quite expensive. You're looking at certainly $25,000 a day just in operational costs.

Speaker 18:

The problem is the people.

Abdellah Bouhou:

We heard about food, we heard about bread, we heard about pump, but-

Stuart Lacey:

Who is now in charge of dealing with and speaking to Yemeni personnel?

Speaker 18:

Our coordinator, but he's in [inaudible].

Stuart Lacey:

Yeah, yeah. So he is in [inaudible]. Who is the next person?

Speaker 18:

Next person, Smit.

Abdellah Bouhou:

When did exactly ... What's kind of problem they have, what exact?

Speaker 18:

[foreign language] with the driver, his driver which is here.

Abdellah Bouhou:

He said?

Speaker 18:

The rain. [foreign language].

Abdellah Bouhou:

The rain?

Speaker 18:

The rain.

Stuart Lacey:

[inaudible], you're in charge. Please.

Speaker 18:

Okay.

Stuart Lacey:

Let's get the water.

Speaker 18:

In continue.

Stuart Lacey:

All right. We're about four and a half Ks from the rig at the side of the water well where we get the water to drill with. No water's being pumped because the pump is being repaired back at the rig site. What we have, as you can see, is a few trucks here. They will fill them up when we get the pump going. We seem to have got the drivers driving again. I'm not sure how, but maybe somebody fed them. Hopefully. There goes one of the trucks, hopefully full of water. We don't know. Anyway, with luck, we should be drilling sometime tonight.

Issam El-Malazi:

It's one of the problems, you know, to deal with which creates headache, yeah, again. Lots of money. But you have to live with these problems now.

Speaker 19:

So these two pages are now going to make the sonar and they will be then later on distributed to London, to the oil partners, and to the ministry from sonar. And every morning I hope all is that this telephone will be functioning and will send the faxes as soon as possible.

Speaker 20:

Ready [inaudible].

Speaker 19:

He doesn't have contact now because [inaudible]. He doesn't want to work. So we got to try it again and every time, all this time, it is costing money. Now it says, "Communication error." I know that. It means it doesn't have contact [inaudible] and we've got to try it again.

Speaker 21:

[foreign language] all the same. [foreign language].

Speaker 22:

[inaudible].

Speaker 21:

[foreign language].

Speaker 22:

[foreign language].

Speaker 21:

[foreign language].

Speaker 19:

It is good, so they know that [inaudible] the picture what is going on here because it is completely different if you are sitting in the city, the offices are ... You are here on this filed operations, completely different world. Busy. Wait again. Quite expensive, the things they get. $15, around $15 per minute. If you look at it, it starts already charging you.

Speaker 23:

[foreign language].

Speaker 19:

They got the contact [inaudible]. See, I'm so happy when he goes.

Issam El-Malazi:

They are drilling, this is good new.

Speaker 23:

Come in. [inaudible].

Speaker 17:

(silence) Drilling mud is quite different. It's chemically complex. The fact that it is a very dense compound, enables the rock cuttings to be brought up with it. When the rock cuttings reach the surface, everything is run over in a shell shaker or basically it sorts out the liquids from the solids. The mud loggers come in, get a sample, take it back to their cabin, and put it under the microscope, and looking at these samples they can tell you whether there are any hydrocarbons.

Stuart Lacey:

At the moment, we are looking for a casing point and we don't really know where we are because it's an expiration well. What we do know is what we're looking at. We can tell you what kind of rock it is, but we're not so sure exactly where it puts us at the well. So we look and describe, and basically wait until we find something that we recognise, if at all. I mean, this could go on for a while. These are the cuttings that came out of the well. And the lovely lads over there washing for us, and they put them in the trays, each ones a different depth, so this is actually going down, down the well. And they probably all look the same. I mean, this was what 17 metres ago. It's pretty much the same. When it all comes along, once you look down the microscope, colours, textures, and the works. I mean, it's just fantastic stuff.

Speaker 24:

Thanks.

Speaker 1:

You have a 12 hour shift. This supplies to the semi-skilled, skilled, and highly skilled persons on the rig. Now, these are the lucky ones. Their supervisors work 24 hours a day.

Jim Webb:

You never know what's going to happen on a wildcat well and you can't really afford to drop your guard at any time because when you do drop your guard, that's usually when something bad happens at the most unexpected time.

Speaker 25:

It's a whole holistic existence for those in supervisory on managerial position. They sleep with their boots on.

Issam El-Malazi:

It's a tough business in terms of physically and mentally, you know.

Speaker 25:

What we are expecting, the next section, we really don't know. This is a wild, wild, wild get. We call it wild get not only because this is several times wild, because we really don't know.

Stuart Lacey:

[inaudible] past state and we just spend the night searching for a certain point at a certain depth at which to set a string of casing. Basically, we knew it was somewhere after 550, 550 metres, but we didn't know exactly where so we just had to feel our way slowly down and find this point. And we were looking for a nice pod, a layer of rock to set this in which would give us a strong, basically a strong foundation for the rest of the well. And we got those two hours after we pooled all the drill sting under the hole, we'll run some them with some wire lined logs, which are some electric tools we run down the hole. And that will give us measurements which will tell us about the well. So that's the next step. In between now and then, I'm going to get back to sleep. I'm absolutely finished.

Abdellah Bouhou:

You can see this bit. We have to, in the cone number one, the broken teeth about six and chipped it. And even from the cone number two and the cone number three. We can use it again, but not for a long interval. Only 100 ... No, more than 100 metres. It depends on the formation, which formation.

Speaker 1:

You have your more reliable mean of determining whether there is hydrocarbon formation or not. And these are the wire line logs. Now, these are electronic measurements or various attributes of the formation such as sound, [perositic], radioactivity, and very importantly resistivity. Electric resistivity.

Speaker 26:

As you can see, my crew are doing the rig up right now and after that they connect the tools which are laying on the catwalk just behind me. And we run in basically. And the tools are operated with electricity, some electronic instruments which require the data. And there's a unit at the surface which the data is coming through the cable which has got conductors inside. And there we can see what's going on down hole. And we record the data for later use, for processing.

Speaker 27:

[foreign language].

Speaker 28:

[inaudible] assigned the cake.

Jim Webb:

If there's not much going on, it can get very boring. Most people on the rig, even when for example, you're fishing, you lost something down the hole, have something to do. But people, like the geologist for example, don't have much to do. The mud loggers don't have much to do.

Stuart Lacey:

[inaudible].

Jim Webb:

It does require a certain amount of ingenuity to keep yourself mentally occupied.

Speaker 29:

[foreign language].

Speaker 30:

[foreign language].

So we went down now from 1,900 [inaudible] to 1,600. We're still not [inaudible] price. [foreign language].

Speaker 29:

[foreign language].

Speaker 30:

[foreign language].

Speaker 29:

[foreign language].

Speaker 30:

[foreign language].

Speaker 29:

[foreign language].

Speaker 30:

[foreign language].

Speaker 29:

[foreign language].

Speaker 30:

[foreign language].

Speaker 29:

[foreign language].

Speaker 31:

(music) (silence) Well, I am a chef is here working about 11 years. And since two month I am working in week. This is very good. Today I am specialist at barbecue. We have the barbecue french onion soup, and the baked potato, chicken, pork, and beef. These are all. Some came from Australia, some New Zealand, and the people from India. Most of the people is like this pork item, they like too much. Yeah. And I stap [capiscam] also. They like stap capisicam. Yeah.

Speaker 32:

[foreign language].

Speaker 33:

[foreign language].

Speaker 32:

Oh, okay.

Speaker 33:

[foreign language].

Speaker 32:

[foreign language].

Speaker 33:

[foreign language].

Speaker 32:

[foreign language].

Speaker 1:

It's very, very important in this business to mention the performance done by the people on the well site, yeah. Because this is the frontier there, you know and they do the very hard work, yeah. And very, very hard work.

Jim Webb:

These men are away from home for long periods of time doing quite often very strenuous work in quite often adverse conditions that make the job more difficult.

Speaker 1:

These are the muscular ballerinas. Okay. Of the desert.

Speaker 34:

[foreign language].

Speaker 25:

1,400 metres, what do you think [inaudible] 14 days if everything goes smoothly.

Jim Webb:

TD stands for total depth, and that's the final depth the well reached. In other words, that's the last foot of rock you drill is TD. That's where you stop it.

Speaker 25:

If nothing ends there, unfortunately, we will have to abandon the well and go and hope we have success next time.

Jim Webb:

As the well was approaching TD and here in London we were, frankly, a bit down in the mouth, because it was fairly obvious from the descriptions that we've been getting back from the well site that there was little of excitement in delta. We did not, frankly, have much expectations from the logs. So by that stage we were resigned to our fate.

Speaker 1:

It was determined that there were the rocks involved did not have any porosity to start with to contain hydrocarbon. That was conclusive and we just bit the bullet and said there are no hydrocarbons in the well.

Jim Webb:

So that was kind of a sinking feeling. So it was more or less a question of finding a definitive place to end the well.

Speaker 1:

The next step would be to plug and abandon the well. You don't just walk away from it. You have to secure the well with cement plugs in the well. So you spend about two or three days plugging the well, securing it, and then abandoning it. Go somewhere else.

Issam El-Malazi:

Every expiration well, even if it's not economic, it brings positive results in terms of geology and is a good base for next step.

Speaker 17:

The whole concept of the well was to test aversion, which we had some slight indicators may exist. And without drilling a well, we could never have proven whether it exists or not.

Speaker 1:

Well, what we are doing now you can say we are licking our wounds. Our future campaign is to soldier on, drill, seal within the block, older structures or prospects we reckon are more favourable than the ones we [inaudible].

Jim Webb:

It means we can probably now downgrade large parts of the acreage, which is valuable in itself. We didn't find hydrocarbons, but now we got a better idea of where not to look.

Speaker 1:

It helps you better understand what you have got and possibly point you out in a certain direction where you should have been in the first place, but you couldn't have known that. You couldn't have known that.

Speaker 25:

We have still a lot of prospects in this area and we have big hope still that there is something in here which got to be discovered.

Speaker 1:

I think that it is an area worth exploring, to find out if there is oil or not. Now, if I knew that there was oil in it would have drilled our first well on that [inaudible]. We are on the chase. (music)