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Expansion will help sustain Alpine field’s crude output Water, gas handling facility upgrades allow crude production to stay at present level Kristen Nelson Petroleum News Editor-in-Chief
Phase one of the Alpine facilities expansion, announced in May, allows for an increase of about 5 percent in oil production — but more importantly, it allows the present level of oil production to continue as more water and gas have to be removed from the crude oil produced at the field.
The field, on Alaska's western North Slope, began production in November 2000 and is currently producing some 100,000 barrels of oil per day. (See related story on page 1.)
Phase 1 of the expansion will allow gas handling to increase by 23 percent, from 130 million standard cubic feet per day to 160 million, Mark Ireland, ConocoPhillips Alaska's western North Slope development manager told Petroleum News May 28.
And water handling capacity will increase from 10,000 barrels per day to 100,000 barrels per day, he said.
The increase in produced water handling is the biggest component of the expansion, and it's something ConocoPhillips and partner Anadarko Petroleum knew they would have to do.
“We can only currently handle about 10,000 barrels a day of produced water and we're currently injecting almost 100,000 barrels a day of seawater,” he said. But the flood performance of the Alpine reservoir “is very good. … we knew we could inject for a number of years before we'd start producing that water back. So we delayed the construction of the produced water handling unit closer to the time that we'd need it.”
Started up by end of 2004 Ireland said the phase 1 expansion is planned to be in place and started up by the end of 2004. The companies said in mid-May that design engineering was being done by NANA/Colt Engineering in Anchorage and that truckable module fabrication would be put out for bid once engineering was complete.
Ireland said the companies anticipate that the modules will be built in Alaska, and when completed will be driven to the North Slope to go out on ice roads next winter and be put in place at Alpine. Then work would then begin to connect the modules to prepare for startup.
The modules will probably go out to Alpine next April, Ireland said. Some improvement in oil rate The facilities expansion will allow the companies to increase the oil production rate by about 5 percent, he said. More importantly, it will extend by a number of years the time that production can stay at that rate, estimated by the companies to be some 105,000 barrels a day.
“We've been producing almost three years now and we're only producing about 1,000 barrels of water per day currently,” Ireland said. The Alpine facilities, originally designed to produce at 80,000 barrels of oil per day, have been producing at a higher rate, some 100,000 barrels per day.
The primary purpose of the facilities is to separate oil, gas and produced water so that oil can be pumped down the pipeline, he said. With production at 100,000 barrels of oil per day, a number of the facilities “needed to be upgraded just to … allow us to be at that kind of rate for the long term.”
At the beginning of production, Ireland said, the facility basically produced 100 percent oil with some gas dissolved in the oil. The gas is reinjected and seawater is injected.
“Eventually, the water we inject and the gas we inject starts to break through at the producing wells and you have an increase then in the amount of gas you need to handle and the amount of water you have to handle.”
If the produced water handling capacity wasn't increased, “once we started making significant amounts of water, we'd have to cut back our oil rate to less than 100,000 barrels a day. And the same is true with the gas handling side. As we start to produce more gas, we'd have to decrease our oil off take.”
The increase in water and gas handling will allow production to stay at 105,000 barrels a day “for a longer period of time than we could have otherwise.”
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