Robert G. Loucks, principal investigator; L. Frank Brown, Jr., Ramón H. Treviño, Ursula Hammes, Stephen C. Ruppel, Julia F. Gale, Fred P. Wang, Jeffrey A. Kane, Florence Bonnaffé, and Romulo Briceno.

The original Project STARR was developed to increase royalty income to the Permanent School Fund through working with operators of State Land leases to improve efficiency of producing fields using the latest reservoir characterization technology. During the last Texas legislative session, the State increased the budget for the Project STARR. In addition to reservoir characterization projects, Project STARR will now look at new venture studies where regional fairways for drilling exploration wells will be emphasized. Also, Project STARR will conduct studies to promote exploitation of unconventional resources such as hydrocarbons from shales, tight gas sands, and low-pressure gas. The project will also work in conjunction with CO2 sequestration studies to promote profitable sequestration of CO2 in oil fields through CO2 enhanced oil recovery. Texas State Lands operators are invited to participate in Project STARR where they can obtain, without charge, expert technical advice in developing State Lands oil and gas fields.

The philosophy of Project STARR is to work with State Lands operators to deploy advanced recovery strategies and newly developed technologies on a field-by-field basis to ensure maximal recovery efficiency. We also work with operators to evaluate deeper prospective higher risk reservoirs such as the deep-shelf gas play. The deep-shelf gas play concentrates on offshore Tertiary sandstone reservoirs between the depths of 15,000 to 35,000 ft. We have strong experience in analysis of 3D seismic data including structural and sequence stratigraphic architectural analyses, stratal slicing, and amplitude anomaly analysis. The STARR group has generated several major publications on sequence stratigraphy and gravity tectonics in the Texas GOM area from these studies.

The most volumetrically significant State Lands oil and gas resources are in the State Waters of the Gulf Coast and State Leases of the Permian Basin. Since 1995, Project STARR studies and data have been used to recommend more than 70 infill wells, 56 recompletions, and 14 step-out wells over the project’s 9-year duration. Project STARR has also worked on and identified several prospects in previously undrilled deeper strata. To date, Project STARR has completed studies or is currently working on 24 fields on State Lands.

Project STARR has contributed to the increase of royalty payments for the benefit of the Permanent School Fund. Over the last 2 years, the program has helped generate $21.3 million in royalties to the Permanent School Fund and $6.3 million in severance tax to the State. Relative to royalty income, Project STARR is revenue positive by a factor of 23.9. This return is higher than that for the last biennium, which produced $9.2 million, for a revenue-positive factor of 10.4.