Ford Lake shale oil said to show promise

Blodgett and Sutherlin collect huge amount of data on Interior Alaska shale play that has been burning or smoldering for decades

Kay Cashman

Petroleum News

Alaska Native regional corporation Doyon Ltd. might be sitting on a significant shale oil play on Windfall Mountain within the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, Anchorage-based Robert Blodgett and his colleague Steve Sutherlin told Petroleum News in late July.

Blodgett, a geologist, and Sutherlin, a strategic operative, have accumulated a large amount of paleontological and geochemical data on the area, with emphasis on the Ford Lake shale play.

The major challenge will be getting the oil to market, as the play is downstream of Eagle, Alaska (population 85), along the Yukon River, near its confluence with the Tatonduk River, Sutherlin, who enjoys problem-solving, told Petroleum News. “I have a few ideas,” he said.

Stretching 1,980 miles in length the Yukon River is the third longest watercourse of North America. The river’s source is in British Columbia, Canada. From there it flows through the Yukon with its lower half lying in Alaska where it turns north, eventually flowing into the Bering Sea.

The area has interested Blodgett “since the time of his M.S. thesis study in the area (1977-1978) and his concurrent work with Louisiana Land & Exploration Co. in the Kandik basin,” Sutherlin said.

“The formation is latest Devonian (Famennian) through early Mississippian age and has been subject to a number of fiery outbursts caused by lightning strikes on hydrocarbon-enriched exposures of the formation on Windfall Mountain,” the colleagues said in an email to Petroleum News.

The data the two have collected addresses the “underlying chert and shale member of the McCann Hill chert (middle-late Devonian). The McCann Hill chert is similarly a deep-water unit, which has significant red burnished outcrops which also were probably sites of shale oil fires caused by lightning strikes. The McCann Hill is laterally equivalent to the Canol shale of the Northwest Territories and Yukon to the east. The Canol is currently regarded as a highly economically significant shale oil resource,” Blodgett and Sutherlin said.

The fire at Windfall Mountain from exposures of the Ford Lake shale has been cited on several web sites starting in 2012. The National Park Service said the fire erupted in 2012, however, “unpublished sources I have indicate that it has existed for a much lengthier time on a smaller scale, including a report to me by Don Hartman (first and former head of the Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys) that he and his Texaco field party had observed a small fire at this site in 1971. In addition, it has been rumored that there have been undocumented observations of a small fire in the same general locality as far back as the late 1950’s,” Blodgett wrote.