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USGS plans CBM tests at Wainwright Summer work involves production test of 2008 well and new wells to delineate extent of coal seams near North Slope village Eric Lidji Petroleum News
The U.S. Geological Survey is planning to test the flow of natural gas produced from a well it drilled last summer into coal seams near the North Slope village of Wainwright.
The federal agency also plans to drill as many as two additional wells in the area this summer to get a better sense of the extent of the coal bed and the gas contained in them.
The drilling is part of a broader effort to determine whether coalbed methane can be used as an alternative to diesel fuel for heating and power in rural communities in Alaska.
Rising oil prices have created financial problems for diesel-based villages in recent years.
In February, residential customers in Wainwright paid $1.50 for a gallon of heating oil. That isn’t a market price, though; the North Slope Borough subsidizes residential fuel use. By comparison, commercial customers paid $7.83 for a gallon of heating oil.
Wainwright sits on the coast of the Chukchi Sea some 70 miles south of Barrow.
As of 2007, the state listed the population of the village at 540.
The Northwest Arctic region of Alaska, which overlaps in part with the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, is believed to hold several trillion tons of coal.
Program more than decade old State and federal teams have been studying coalbed methane production in Alaska for at least 15 years, starting with a well drilled in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough north of Anchorage. The testing moved to more remote corners of Alaska in the early years of this decade with one test well in Fort Yukon in 2004 and another at Franklin Bluffs in 2005.
USGS drilled the first test well at Wainwright in the summer of 2007.
Preliminary test results from the well suggested that the methane produced from the coal seams could meet Wainwright’s electric generation needs for the next 10 to 40 years.
USGS crews returned to Wainwright this past summer to drill a “central production well” and four “monitor wells,” according to USGS co-project chief Art Clark.
Clark said the crews conducted a four-day test to check the equipment and to get information to help design a longer-term production test in the future. Over the winter, they used the wells to gather data about pressure and temperature in the well bore.
In early to mid-June, USGS plans to begin a one- to two-month production test.
The crews also plan to drill one or two wells to delineate the extent of the coal seams and measure the gas content of the coal. The crews originally planned to drill one of these delineation wells last year, but spent the time installing the array of monitor wells instead.
The testing will help USGS understand how gas and water move through coal seams.
USGS, an arm of the U.S. Department of the Interior, is permitting the two wells, Wainwright No. 10 and No. 11, with the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.
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