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Shell, Conoco to innovate in Chukchi Shell’s three-year seismic program may be largest exploration program company has shot; ConocoPhillips investigating jack-ups Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
Extensive seismic and planning for offshore drilling and development were two topics addressed by Shell and ConocoPhillips Oct. 29 at the United States and Canada Northern Oil and Gas Research Forum. The two companies have extensive offshore acreage positions in the Alaska Arctic.
Shell has 10 seasons of operations experience in the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas, said Pete Slaiby, Shell Exploration and Production Co.’s Alaska general manager.
“It’s a very seasonal bit of business, meaning that we operate for about four months in open water season, during which time we have to share this open water with a number of subsistence hunters and basically are operating in their garden,” he said.
The company holds 275 leases in the Chukchi Sea and about 160 in the Beaufort, he said.
Slaiby said the three-season 3-D seismic program Shell has shot in the Alaska offshore Arctic “may be the largest one we have ever done with respect to an exploration 3-D program.”
In the Beaufort the company is working the Camden Bay area with prospects at Sivulliq and Torpedo, and trying “to bring along some of the development opportunity simultaneously with the exploration,” with geotechnical activities and soil sampling opportunities “to determine just how stable bottoms are so we can continue to move ... the platform development along.” That information will tie in with a full environmental impact statement for development projects, Slaiby said.
Another thing Shell is doing is “looking at how we can work through some of the shoulder months with respect to working on ice when we would not be impacting the subsistence hunt or the open water seasons.”
NPR-A, Chukchi Conoco focus Geoffrey Haddad, ConocoPhillips Alaska’s new vice president of exploration and land said offshore Alaska the company’s focus is in the Chukchi, with its primary acreage position over the old Klondike oil discovery.
He said the company is evaluating whether vessels that have been used in the Arctic offshore in the past are appropriate because there is less and less ice in the Chukchi Sea. Haddad said “we’re getting a larger open season and so we’re actually investigating the idea of using ice-hardened jack-up rigs and we’re doing research related to that.”
With several ice-free months over the company’s Foraker prospect, a jack-up might be appropriate.
“It hasn’t been used before, it hasn’t been approved for the Arctic, but we are working on that scenario for possible drilling given that part of the Arctic ... is not ice-covered throughout the summer.”
But that’s for exploration.
Development in the Chukchi, if a commercial accumulation of oil is found, could not rely on a continuing trend of ice-free periods. “So we’d have to be prepared for multiyear ice,” and Haddad said ConocoPhillips is looking at gravity-based structures such as the one at New Hibernia in the Newfoundland area.
“But this is a technology that really has not been developed in the Arctic yet and so there’s a lot more research to do in the Arctic area.”
Bringing oil ashore will require “techniques for subsea pipelines to shore, subsea trees underneath ice.” Multiyear ice could have deep keels so there could be a problem with scour. Haddad said ConocoPhillips is “doing a lot of work on that and would encourage that quite a bit more work be done on ice scour studies, weather and oceanography studies and seasonal ice movement.”
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