Kuparuk EUR up 76% since startup

Improved technology over the past three decades has increased the amount of recoverable oil at the Kuparuk oil field by 76 percent, according to operator ConocoPhillips.

The largest producer in Alaska said that its predecessor companies had originally expected to recover some 1.5 billion barrels of oil from the North Slope field when they brought the field into production in the early 1980s, but a series of technologies over the years have increased that estimated ultimate recovery figure to 2.5 billion barrels.

The technologies include hydraulic fracturing, enhanced oil recovery, coil-tube drilling and 4-D seismic, the company said at its analyst day on April 10. “If we hadn’t done that we would’ve run out of oil at Kuparuk back in the 1990s,” Executive Vice President of Technology and Projects Al Hirshberg said, according to a company transcript. “And today with the technology advances we have had and the additional ones we expect to have, we expect that we’ll be operating there for decades to come at Kuparuk.”

—Eric Lidji