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Routing pipelines Furie applies for easement for twin lines from planned Cook Inlet platform Alan Bailey Petroleum News
In another step toward permitting its planned gas field development in the Kitchen Lights unit in the upper Cook Inlet, Furie Operating Alaska has applied to Alaska’s Division of Mining, Land and Water for an easement to lay twin gas gathering pipelines between an offshore production platform and a planned onshore gas processing facility near Nikiski on the Kenai Peninsula.
16-mile lines The pipelines, each about 16 miles in length, will consist of steel piping with an outside diameter of 10 inches, Furie’s application says. Pipeline laid offshore will be weighed down by a concrete shell to sit stably on the seafloor. And directional drilling will be used to bore a subsurface corridor under the coastal bluff close to the production facility to enable the pipelines from the facility to run underground below the bluff and emerge on the seafloor about 2,500 feet beyond the intertidal zone, the application says.
For much of their offshore route, the planned pipelines will pass along the same pipeline corridor as the Hilcorp Alaska-operated Cook Inlet Gas Gathering System pipelines, with the Furie pipelines lying approximately 100 feet east of the Hilcorp lines and reaching landfall just north of those lines, the application says.
Gas processed at the onshore facility will be delivered into the existing gas pipeline infrastructure at Nikiski.
Offshore platform The offshore platform, which Furie hopes to install on site as early as April 2014, would sit in the middle of the inlet, approximately halfway between Tyonek on the west side of the Inlet and the Birch Hill area of the northern Kenai Peninsula. Construction of the pipelines, with a barge laying the offshore sections, may also start as early as April 2014 and may be completed as early as September 2014, the easement application says. The application says that the platform will have a “60-foot diameter platform support footprint” — Furie has previously said that the platform will be of monopod design, standing on the seafloor using a single leg.
The planned pipelines are intended to carry any water collected on the platform as well as untreated natural gas, the easement application says.
“Each marine gas gathering pipeline will initially transport up to approximately 100 million standard cubic feet of natural gas per day,” the application says. “At peak production, an estimated 8,000 barrels of liquid and up to a maximum of 30 billion cubic feet of natural gas will be transported through the lines to the production facility annually.”
Gas find In 2011 Furie announced a major gas find in its Kitchen Lights unit No. 1 well, drilled using the Spartan 151 jack-up rig. Since then the company has drilled two more wells in the unit and has embarked on the drilling of a fourth well. In March 2012 the company told the state Legislature that the find was estimated to have probable gas reserves of 750 billion cubic feet, with a potential production rate of up to 30 million cubic feet per day. But since then the company has remained tight-lipped about the size and nature of its find.
A statement of discovery filed by Furie with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources in July, reported that the Kitchen Lights unit no. 3 well, which Furie completed and tested this summer, encountered multiple productive gas pools in the Sterling and Beluga formations at depths ranging from 3,618 feet to 6,228 feet.
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