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Alaska Shale: Great Bear scored, but didn’t win it all Although Great Bear well-positioned, Duncan and Decker say there’s plenty of room for other players in North Slope shale plays Kay Cashman Petroleum News
Will there be room for other companies to develop shale plays on Alaska’s North Slope or did Great Bear Petroleum win most of the acreage in the oil maturation window?
“By no means did Great Bear win all of the acreage that would be prospective, that would appear to be in the oil maturation window,” Alaska Division of Oil and Gas geologist Paul Decker told Petroleum News.
“I think they are very well-positioned geologically,” he said, referring to the 500,000 acres-plus the newly formed independent was high bidder on in the October State of Alaska North Slope oil and gas lease sale. (See maps on page 19.)
But it’s “a question of geology versus ‘close-ology,’” Decker said. “Based on thermal maturity, the North Slope source rock plays likely extend far beyond Great Bear’s acreage position, particularly to the west. However, from the perspective of needing to build out year-round access and infrastructure tie-backs, someplace very close to the Dalton Highway, TAPS, and producing fields would seem a logical place to start,” and Great Bear’s acreage brackets both the Dalton Highway (Haul Road) and the nearby trans-Alaska oil pipeline, Decker said.
Great Bear President Ed Duncan gave Petroleum News a similar answer when asked f there was room for other players.
Yes, there’s no doubt there is room for others,” Duncan said.
“We carefully selected all our acreage,” paying close attention to the maturity of the rock, making sure it was in the oil window. “We won exactly what we wanted, as much as we wanted. We’ll be busy with it for the rest of my life, and probably longer,” he said.
Next North Slope lease sale So what about the next North Slope lease sale? In their planning for the October 2011 sale, Division of Oil and Gas officials asked Duncan what he thinks the next lease sale will look like.
In fact, division Director Kevin Banks has his people studying what will make state lease sales better for bidders interested in source rock plays.
Here is what Duncan said he told division officials: “There will be starry eyed speculators; there will be companies that have ability to think about what this play actually is and understand the technological drivers and bid in an intelligent way; and there will be some in between.”
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