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Renaissance stakes 10 Umiat wells
Kay Cashman Petroleum News
At the end of August, Renaissance Umiat LLC staked 10 wells on two of its leases in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska’s Umiat oil field, which straddles the eastern border of NPR-A on the northern edge of the Brooks Range Foothills. The company plans to drill seven or eight of the wells this coming winter with Doyon-Akita’s Arctic Wolf rig, or a rig it brings in from Canada.
Three of the wells Renaissance staked are on lease AA084141 and seven are on AA081726, per the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Web site.
Discovered in 1946 by the U.S. Navy, the Umiat field was never developed, but is estimated to hold 70-100 million barrels of recoverable oil.
Renaissance was initially looking at drilling 11 wells but company executive Mark Landt told Petroleum News Sept. 3 that the company couldn’t find a surface location that was suitable for the eleventh well.
Renaissance is preparing to file permit applications and an oil spill contingency plan with the State of Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation. According to Landt the Alaska Oil and Gas Association has recommended DEC require a spill plan for 50 barrels or less because the oil in the Umiat pool is shallow and therefore cold, needing pumps to bring it to the surface.
The equipment needed to contain a 50-barrel or less oil spill will not require the small independent to join an oil spill cooperative, such as Alaska Clean Seas, Landt said.
Promising, but challenging In May 2002, Greg Hebertson, who was doing corporate and strategic planning for Anadarko Petroleum at the time, spoke in Anchorage about his company’s geologic assessment of the Brooks Range Foothills. Some of the assessment’s results came from analyses of data from old wells in the Umiat field. (Then — and now — Anadarko and its partners held the largest block of acreage in the foothills, including plays in the Umiat area.)
“Reserves are questionable in that area, but we think there’s up to about 100 million barrels recoverable from Umiat,” Hebertson said.
In addition to presenting promising technical data on area source and reservoir rock, Hebertson talked about the trap component in the region, noting it had a “propensity for multiple structural traps as in the case of the Umiat field.”
“Seismic lines across Umiat show hydrocarbons are reservoired in both the hanging wall and the foot wall of the structures,” he said.
“The seal capacity of traps — data from Umiat wells and field work and based on our analysis — … show the seals are there and certainly capable of holding large hydrocarbon columns. The risk associated with that is breaching either by erosion or fracturing.”
In a March interview Landt said the reason the field has not been developed is “generally due to the remoteness from infrastructure and pipelines and due to historically low oil prices.”
The Umiat reservoir is shallow, 200 to 1,400 feet in depth, he said, with “a portion of the oil … in permafrost. That’s a challenge in itself.”
The company wants to “get some modern well data and then determine whether or not we have something commercial. We’ll do some horizontal drilling, and penetrate further into the reservoir, which will help us get a better understanding of what kind of recovery rate we can expect,” Landt said.
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