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Savant Alaska holds off drilling Kupcake Opstad: inability to secure rig reason for independent’s decision to wait until next winter to test Liberty-area Beaufort prospect Kay Cashman Petroleum News
On Jan. 16, Erik Opstad said Savant Alaska has postponed drilling its Beaufort Sea Kupcake No. 1 well until next winter. The independent, he told Petroleum News, was unable to secure a drilling rig for its exploration program, initially expected to start in February.
Opstad, a consultant tasked with finding a drilling rig and putting together a group of contractors for Savant, said the “effort to close a rig sublease agreement for the current winter drilling season was unsuccessful.” The delay, he said, will give the company “time to bring forward alternative drilling resources.”
He said all permit applications for the project, “with exception of the AOGCC permit to drill, have been filed with the appropriate agencies” and that the exploration plan of operations filed with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources was not expected to change.
Savant, he said, was going to “continue to pursue and secure all necessary permits, approvals and authorizations related to the project” and had asked permitting agencies to issue permits that “reflect this change in schedule.”
Savant Alaska, a closely held limited liability company that is an affiliate of Denver-based Shaw Resources and new to Alaska, was “fully capitalized to go forward” with exploration, Patterson Shaw told Petroleum News in April. Shaw, president of both companies, won the Beaufort Sea leases at the March 1 state areawide lease sale, later transferring them to Savant Alaska LLC. He bid a total of $1.465 million for the seven leases in bids ranging from $10.17 to $207.35 per acre.
East of Prudhoe Bay, the Kupcake prospect is adjacent to the 130 million barrel offshore Liberty field operated by BP. Savant’s leases extend east towards BP’s offshore/onshore Badami oil field along the Mikkelsen Bay fault zone. Kupcake No. 1, Savant has said, is approximately 8,000 feet west of the Liberty No. 1 discovery well in Section 29, T11N, R18E, UM.
Although BP has not yet sanctioned development of Liberty, in January a company spokesman confirmed what BP has been saying for a number of months — that BP “is moving forward energetically … to see (Liberty) approved.”
Hoping to recover 100 million barrels According to True North Energy Corp., a publicly held independent out of Houston, Texas, that took an 8.4 percent working interest in Kupcake in late 2006 by pooling leases, Savant hopes to discover 200 million barrels of oil at Kupcake in the Kemik formation, with 100 million barrels of that recoverable.
Greg Vigil, a former BP Exploration (Alaska) employee who runs Savant’s Alaska operations from Shaw’s Denver headquarters, described Kupcake No. 1 as “a conventional exploration well targeting several hundred feet of Beaufortian age sediments located at a depth of approximately 10,600 feet.”
“ … based on interpretation of licensed 3-D seismic data, Savant suggests that Beaufortian sediments have filled an accommodation space between the NW-SE trending Mikkelsen Bay and Tigvariak faults adjacent to the discovery at Liberty,” Vigil said.
Kupcake’s name comes from “KUParuk zone-C and KEkiktuk equals KUPCAKE. The Kuparuk-C age Beaufortian sands are the sweet icing atop the Kekiktuk,” Opstad said.
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