temporary abandonment

Houston co. starts work on 9 orphan wells in Gulf of Mexico

The temporary abandonment of the nine wells, which are located in the Matagorda Island lease area in the Gulf of Mexico, is the first stage of full decommissioning of oil and gas infrastructure. Photo via Getty Images

A Houston-based company that develops, produces, and decommissions mature assets in a cost-effective and environmentally sustainable manner and begun work on the temporary abandonment of nine orphan wells.

Promethean Energy has announced the beginning of the project on the wells on behalf of the Department of Interior's Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, or BSEE. The temporary abandonment of the nine wells, which are located in the Matagorda Island lease area in the Gulf of Mexico, is the first stage of full decommissioning of oil and gas infrastructure.

"We are very proud to have been able to start work and contribute to this project of strategic national importance commissioned by BSEE," Promethean's SVP Decommissioning Steve Louis says in a news release.

The company was awarded a five-year Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract "to address the most immediate and urgent needs representing safety and environmental hazards" of the wells which no prior owner survives, per the release.

Promethean has conducted its own inspection of the platforms using drone-based laser scan technology in order to digitalize the structures and evaluate the equipment to plan safe boarding and procedures.

The next steps of decommissioning the wells will be to repair the platforms and wellhead equipment, followed by well diagnostics testing and the well decommissioning itself.

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A View From HETI

Vicki Hollub, president and CEO of Occidental, said the company's Stratos DAC project is on track to begin capturing CO2 later this year. Photo via 1pointfive.com

Houston-based Occidental Petroleum is gearing up to start removing CO2 from the atmosphere at its $1.3 billion direct air capture (DAC) project in the Midland-Odessa area.

Vicki Hollub, president and CEO of Occidental, said during the company’s recent second-quarter earnings call that the Stratos project — being developed by carbon capture and sequestration subsidiary 1PointFive — is on track to begin capturing CO2 later this year.

“We are immensely proud of the achievements to date and the exceptional record of safety performance as we advance towards commercial startup,” Hollub said of Stratos.

Carbon dioxide captured by Stratos will be stored underground or be used for enhanced oil recovery.

Oxy says Stratos is the world’s largest DAC facility. It’s designed to pull 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air and either store it underground or use it for enhanced oil recovery. Enhanced oil recovery extracts oil from unproductive reservoirs.

Most of the carbon credits that’ll be generated by Stratos through 2030 have already been sold to organizations such as Airbus, AT&T, All Nippon Airways, Amazon, the Houston Astros, the Houston Texans, JPMorgan, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks and TD Bank.

The infrastructure business of investment manager BlackRock has pumped $550 million into Stratos through a joint venture with 1PointFive.

As it gears up to kick off operations at Stratos, Occidental is also in talks with XRG, the energy investment arm of the United Arab Emirates-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., to form a joint venture for the development of a DAC facility in South Texas. Occidental has been awarded up to $650 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to build the South Texas DAC hub.

The South Texas project, to be located on the storied King Ranch, will be close to industrial facilities and energy infrastructure along the Gulf Coast. Initially, the roughly 165-square-mile site is expected to capture 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, with the potential to store up to 3 billion metric tons of CO2 per year.

“We believe that carbon capture and DAC, in particular, will be instrumental in shaping the future energy landscape,” Hollub said.

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