A publicly held independent, San Diego, CA-based Royale Energy, announced Tuesday it successfully drilled a new well in the historically heavily drilled dry gas Rio Vista field in the Sacramento Basin in eastern Contra Costa County. No flow rates were given, but two earlier wells in the vicinity drilled last year are producing 2 MMcf/d collectively, said Don Hosmer, a Royale Energy executive in San Diego.

Sustained higher gas prices are allowing Royale to drill more wells, said Hosmer, adding that his firm will “drill twice as many wells” this year because of added capital available.

“We actually haven’t completed the well yet, we just set pipe yesterday (Aug. 6), so we haven’t gotten a flow rate, but it looks great,” Hosmer said. “The log book looks just like some of the other (producing) wells in the area. Texaco drilled the first well on this same (McCormack) lease back in the 1970s, and three of those wells are still producing.

“We went in two years ago and ran three-D seismic, and then began last year drilling the undrilled fault blocks we felt had potential to them.”

In 1997, Royale bought 900 to 1,000 acres in the Sacramento Basin with the merchant power generators as a potential market. So far, they have sold output from the wells in the area to Calpine Corp., Duke Energy and Dynegy, said Hosmer, noting his firm sold its July supplies to Calpine, including some from McCormack, but this month it is selling everything to Duke.

So far, Hosmer said, he has not done cost estimates on the latest drilling, which is “directional along the fault block.” Most of the drilling in the area is mid-depth for Rio Vista, he said, noting the firm is looking at the seismic data on the new well in relation to the two earlier ones to determine how much, if any, additional drilling it will do.

Royale is also actively pursuing new strikes on 28 square miles of dry gas Bower Bank field it owns in the southern half of the state, 20 miles northwest of Bakersfield in oil/gas rich Kern County. The increased activity is due to the sustained prices for natural gas and improved new three-D exploration technology that cuts the costs of finding new supplies, Hosmer said.

“That area (Rio Vista) is very well drilled out, but the three-D allowed us to get up-depth from some of the production, up closer to the fault trap, and we were able to access gas that hadn’t been drained,” Hosmer said. “Generally, three-D is a tighter grid pattern and it gives you a better picture of left-behind gas reserves.”

Royale is concentrating on dry gas fields and drilling at relatively shallow depths (6,000 to 7,000) feet, said Hosmer, noting that his company is planning to move the drilling rig that was on the recently completed, 7,000-foot-deep McCormack No. 8 well in Rio Vista back to the East Rice Creek field at Victor Ranch where Royale has drilled five previous wells. Three to four new wells are slated in that field, using the same three-D pictures that have allowed it to go “five-for-five” so far.

“We concentrate on going in over producing fields, using three-D, and imaging either undrilled fault blocks or added gas in up-dipped portions of the structure,” Hosmer said.

Separately, the company noted that although it is an independent primarily focused on gas and oil exploration in California, it will participate in drilling of a 12,000-foot natural gas well off the Texas Gulf Coast.

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