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Exploration gets waist deep in April ConocoPhillips to P&A three, Chevron spuds third at White Hills, Tofkat finds oil, Anadarko done, Savant halfway at Kupcake Eric Lidji Petroleum News
With the first few weeks of spring under way, the winter exploration season on the North Slope is gearing up for some companies and winding down for others.
ConocoPhillips is effectively finished drilling for the season around Alpine and Anadarko has wrapped up work on Jacob’s Ladder and Chandler.
Meanwhile Savant is continuing its first well in Alaska, Chevron started its third and possibly final exploration well in the White Hills for this winter and at Tofkat, Brooks Range Petroleum Corp. is shooting seismic to evaluate an oil find.
ConocoPhillips gets in and out ConocoPhillips is first to the finish line for the season, wrapping up work on the three exploration wells it drilled this winter.
Rebounding from an unsuccessful drilling season last winter exploring more far-flung prospects in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, ConocoPhillips focused this winter on possible satellites of the Alpine field along the western edge of the central North Slope and fields in the nearby Greater Mooses Tooth Unit in NPR-A.
ConocoPhillips drilled the Char No. 1 and the Spark Down-Dip No. 9 wells and returned to the Rendezvous No. 2 well this winter. The company has not yet released any results of the test work done this year, but announced plans to plug and abandon all three wells.
Presumably proceeding on a first-in, first-out basis, ConocoPhillips already plugged and abandoned Char on April 16. Spud back on Feb 12, ConocoPhillips used the well to test flow rates and gauge the economics of the field.
Char No. 1 sits inside the Colville River Unit, 12 miles north of the village of Nuiqsut. The Kuukpik Corp. owns the surface land, while the subsurface rights belong to the State of Alaska and the Arctic Slope Regional Corp.
Using the same rig, ConocoPhillips moved west and spent two weeks drilling at Spark DD 9, spudding the well on March 12 and finishing March 24. Spark DD 9 sits some 15 miles west of the Alpine field, southeast of Teshekpuk Lake in the Greater Mooses Tooth Unit.
The well helped satisfy initial development requirements for the new unit, which is under the purview of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
Finally, the company finished work on the Rendezvous No. 2 well on April 3. Rendezvous No. 2 sits four miles due west of Spark DD9.
Chevron starts Panthera Chevron spud the Panthera 28-6-9 well in its White Hills prospect on March 29.
Panthera is Chevron’s third exploration well drilled this winter at White Hills, located in the foothills of the Brooks Range just west of the Dalton Highway.
Earlier in the year, Chevron spud the Smilodon 9-4-9 well and the Mastodon 6-3-9 well at White Hills using the Nabors rig 106. The company hopes to drill eight wells over a two-year program.
Chevron would not release any results from those wells, or the targets of the exploration program, calling it a “tight” venture.
Chevron named all of the proposed wells in the White Hills prospect after prehistoric animals.
Tofkat hits ‘oil bearing sandstone reservoir’ Drilling at the Tofkat No. 1 well this winter found “oil bearing sandstone reservoir,” according to the independent joint venture carrying out the exploration program.
The sandstone reservoir is in a part of the Kuparuk formation situated near the Nanuq field to the northwest. Tofkat No. 1 sits due east of the village of Nuiqsut.
Log analysis and testing with an MDT tool showed an interval of 10 feet of gross pay and between four and six feet of net pay, which the joint venture called “comparable to the Nanuq field.” An MDT, or Modular Formation Dynamics Tester, tool tests pressure within the wellbore.
Brooks Range Petroleum Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Alaska Venture Capital Group, is running the winter exploration program on behalf of a joint venture with TG World Energy Corp., Nabors subsidiary Ramshorn Investments Inc. and Bow Valley Alaska Corp.
The companies did not yet attempt a production test on Tofkat No. 1.
However, by drilling two sidetrack wells, one with a bottomhole location 3,500 feet to the southeast and another with a bottomhole location 4,500 feet to the northwest, the joint venture thinks it has “established the edge of the reservoir.” All three wells also “encountered oil in secondary targets above the Kuparuk.”
Hoping to better evaluate the prospect, the joint venture is currently shooting 3-D seismic over a 210 square mile area of its neighboring leases.
BRPC expect to finish the survey by the end of April and use the rest of the year to analyze the data in preparation for the 2009 winter drilling season. Until then, the company plugged and suspended Tofkat No. 1.
The seismic will also be used to evaluate the secondary Brookian targets found in the three well bores.
Should BRPC ultimately decide Tofkat is a commercial prospect, the company and its partners would have to decide how to process the oil it produces there. The current business strategy for the company “does not include the use of existing facilities under the current ACES plan,” Hillary McIntosh, manager of business development and external affairs wrote to Petroleum News, referring to the tax code revisions enacted last fall.
Anadarko finishes at Jacob’s Ladder, Chandler Anadarko has almost finished its exploration work for the winter.
“They’re kind of in that winding-things-down-period right now,” company spokesman Mark Hanley told Petroleum News.
The Houston-based mega-independent finished work on the Jacob’s Ladder well on April 2, demobilizing the newly winterized Akita 63 rig and moving it to Deadhorse.
The company also finished drilling the Chandler No. 1 gas well for the season.
Chandler is a deeper gas well, with a target depth of 10,200 feet, and so the company plans to leave the Nabors rig 105 at the site and return to finish the well during a future drilling season.
Anadarko does not yet have results from any of three wells it drilled this winter.
Those results will help determine whether or not the company will drill more wells at Jacob’s Ladder in coming winters. An oil prospect, Jacob’s Ladder sits 10 miles southeast of Prudhoe Bay near the former Slugger unit. Other partners in the project include Arctic Slope Regional Corp. and London-based BG Group.
Savant nearly halfway to target depth at Kupcake Drilling from an ice island in the near-shore waters of the Beaufort Sea, Savant Alaska LLC is about halfway to hitting the target depth for the Kupcake No. 1 well, according to a partner on the project.
In a release sent out April 7, the Houston-based True North Energy Corp. said the well had hit a depth of 4,100 feet. Savant spud Kupcake No. 1 on March 26 and expects to drill to a total depth of more than 11,000 feet in order to test the Kemik formation.
True North owns acreage near Kupcake and the two companies have a deal allowing Savant to drill on that acreage sometime and in return give True North a small working interest in any future production unit.
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