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Oooguruk flowline passes hydraulic test Pioneer has three well cellars in place, Nabors rig 19 rigging up on drilling island to begin drilling this year, first oil in 2008 Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
Pioneer Natural Resources passed a milestone in early May with a successful hydro test of its Oooguruk project flowline.
“We’ve come a long way in a very short time,” Pioneer Natural Resources Alaska President Ken Sheffield told the Alaska Support Industry Alliance May 10.
The company drilled three exploration wells at the prospect in early 2003, brought the project to sanction within three years and will be producing oil in 2008, he said.
The project’s drilling island in the Beaufort Sea was built and armored in 2006. Materials and equipment were procured and module fabrication and modifications to Nabors rig 19 were all begun last year, Sheffield said.
This year, subsea and onshore flowlines were installed to tie the producing island back to shore and modules were installed on both the island and on Pioneer’s onshore facility.
The offshore drill site is 5.7 miles from shore and then it is another 2.4 miles to Pioneer’s onshore pad.
“Most of the modules have been set; a lot of them are being hooked up right now. The rig is in place and rigging up. The subsea flowline is in place,” he said.
Various challenges Transportation was one of the project’s challenges, he said, with supplies and modules needed from around the world, and 110 truckable modules being brought in, more than 70 from New Iberia in south Louisiana; another 40-plus were built in Anchorage. The Louisiana modules were trucked to Seattle, barged to Valdez and trucked to the slope “on a very, very tight schedule,” Sheffield said.
Another challenge was subsidence at the gravel island, built off the mouth of the Colville River where there are “some pretty muddy sediments” and the island would subside over time.
Technology to deal with that problem was borrowed from the Gulf Coast. “Down in south Louisiana they know a little something about building things on mud,” Sheffield said. The technique used involved punching a fabric wick through the mud into the gravel below. As gravel is piled on top, it squeezes water out of the mud “and the wicks provide an avenue in the gravel for the water to escape and it basically allows the island to settle quickly and evenly,” he said.
And there was a lot of gravel: the trucks carrying it made more than 20,000 trips, traveling more than 400,000 miles and moved almost a million cubic yards of material. This was last winter, after which the gravel was worked to allow the ice bound in it to thaw and drain away.
Pioneer also got three well conductors in last fall in advance of this year’s drilling.
Flowlines technically challenging Sheffield said the flowlines were the most technically challenging part of this year’s work. The buried lines include a 12-inch pipe to carry production from the island to shore; that 12-inch pipe is within a 16-inch pipe that provides secondary containment. The flowlines also include a water line to take water to the island for injection to maintain reservoir pressure, a 6-inch line to carry natural gas for enhanced oil recovery and a 2-inch Arctic heating fuel line. These five strings of pipe are in a flowline bundle.
There is also an electrical cable connecting the island to the onshore facility, buried in a separate trench from the flowline bundle.
Sheffield said a “big milestone” had been reached just a few days before he spoke. “We did the hydro testing this week and it all checked out,” he said.
Sheffield said work continues on the access agreement with the Kuparuk River unit owners, the agreement that will let Pioneer use Kuparuk River unit processing facilities to process Oooguruk oil.
“We’ve made some really significant progress and we believe that we are down to just a few critical issues to get that agreement in place.”
A memorandum of understanding has been signed, basically outlining the principles of the agreement, he said. “We felt confident enough in the companies that we were dealing with and with the fundamentals that we had agreed to, to move forward with this project.”
As for what’s next, Sheffield said the company’s next big Alaska project, in the appraisal phase now, is the Cosmopolitan project on the Kenai Peninsula. “And we plan to drill an appraisal well in approximately the August timeframe,” he said.
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