More CI seismic, but what of Apache?

Seismic company SAExploration has submitted a seismic permit application to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for a proposed survey in the southeasterly sector of the upper Cook Inlet. The application says that SAE wants to conduct the survey using cable-free, ocean-bottom technology at some time between Sept. 1, 2014, and Aug. 31, 2015, with an exclusion period in the middle of the winter.

According to a map that accompanies the application the survey area encompasses about 698 square miles of the inlet, offshore the west coast of the Kenai Peninsula, from just south of Kenai to an area near Anchor Point. The area appears to include a substantial region of state rather than federal waters.

Apache Alaska Corp., the company that has been conducting a multi-year seismic program in the Cook Inlet basin, declined to comment on who might be the client for SAE’s planned work. This year Apache has been continuing with seismic surveying in the northern Kenai Peninsula and the more northerly part of the inlet. In a June 11 email, Kathleen King, legislative and policy advisor for the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, told Petroleum News that Apache’s three-year seismic program on state lands comes to an end on Aug. 31, 2014, and that, at this point, Apache has not applied for an extension to the program.

On May 20 Ethan Schutt, senior vice president, land and energy development, for Cook Inlet Region Inc., told the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources that a lack of coordination between federal permitting agencies, with complications arising from the critical habitat designation for the protected Cook Inlet beluga whales, had caused Apache to scale down a planned major 3-D seismic program in the Cook Inlet basin, to a smaller, discontinuous 2-D program. In a June 10 email, Apache spokeswoman Lisa Parker told Petroleum News that Apache had nothing to add to Schutt’s statement.

- Alan Bailey