State OKs Oooguruk participating areas

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On Aug. 5 Alaska’s Division of Oil and Gas approved the Kuparuk and Nuiqsut participating areas for Pioneer Natural Resources’ Oooguruk oil field, in the Beaufort Sea offshore Alaska’s North Slope.

Oil production at Oooguruk began in June 2008, and since then oil has flowed from the Kuparuk and Nuiqsut intervals, the field’s two production zones. Approval of participating areas will facilitate equitable allocation of costs and production volumes among entities with ownership interests in the field.

Although field production started from the Kuparuk, with oil flow rates from that zone proving very robust, Pioneer has said that it considers the Nuiqsut to be the main production horizon — the company is in the process of drilling a pattern of horizontal production and water injection wells in this horizon.

And in its current plan of development for the Oooguruk unit, Pioneer says that it will use knowledge gained during development to assess “our exploitation opportunities in the acreage immediately outside our development areas and at varying horizons.”

According to the division’s participating area approval findings, the Kuparuk zone lies in lower Cretaceous Kuparuk C sandstone, a part of the Kuparuk River formation that also contains the reservoirs of the Kuparuk River field in the central North Slope. The Nuiqsut interval occurs in the Nuiqsut sandstone, a part of the Jurassic Kingak formation, which includes the reservoir interval for the Alpine field in the Colville River Delta.

—Alan Bailey