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Alaska Shale: Twenty new drilling rigs not impossible
Kay Cashman Petroleum News
If Great Bear Petroleum is to meet its development schedule of 200 wells a year for the next 45 years it will need at least 20 drilling rigs working year-round on its 500,000 acres on Alaska’s North Slope.
The rigs will likely have to be specially designed for the company’s North Slope shale program, although Alaska rig operators say there are two to three rigs on the Slope now that are capable of drilling the two production test wells Great Bear has planned for first quarter 2012 and its two full production wells for late 2012, all of which are expected to be 9,000 to 11,000 feet deep with 4,000 to 6,000 foot laterals.
There are more rigs that could handle the four core holes the company is looking to drill first, as early as this summer and as late as the end of the year.
“Tough, but not impossible,” says Nabors Petroleum News asked Dave Hebert at Nabors Alaska Drilling if Nabors could deliver 20 new rigs in 12 months because Great Bear is hoping to sanction development by 2013. Three years ago Nabors delivered the first purpose-built AC rigs for the North Slope in 13 months, from design to delivery. Two years ago the company delivered CDR-2 to ConocoPhillips at Kuparuk; it was the first purpose-built coiled tubing rig designed for the Arctic. It took 18 months, from design to delivery.
Hebert said it would be “tough, but not impossible,” to provide a one-year turnaround on rigs for Great Bear.
“A lot would depend on the rig design, and if all 20 rigs were essentially the same. We certainly have a lot of options for rig construction at our disposal,” he said. “Nabors is capable of doing its own in-house rig engineering and construction at our facility in Canada. We have strong relationships with companies such as NOV-Dreco and Columbia Corp.”
Parent Nabors Industries “has companies that manufacture many different drilling rig components such as top drives, pipe handlers and fluid monitoring systems, just to name a few,” Hebert said.
“Currently we have 35 rigs under construction construction for delivery between now and mid-2012.”
Hebert said Nabors always keeps a significant number of long lead items on order, in the “pipeline,” so to speak; items such as “SCRs and VFD equipment and engines and so forth, because we can always use them as maintenance items if the rig construction market slows down.”
In the last five years “Nabors Industries has built 220 rigs.
“In addition to the construction options mentioned above,” he said, “Nabors has proven itself very successful at using Chinese manufacturing companies to mass produce structural rig components, such as masts and substructures, then fitting them with operational components such as pumps, draw works and electronics here in the states.”
So the answer is for 20 rigs in a year: “No small task by any means, but certainly not impossible.”
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