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The Explorers 2009: BP Exploration (Alaska)
BP Exploration opened its first office in Alaska in 1959, and drilled a confirmation well for the Prudhoe Bay discovery a decade later. Today it operates the unit and its participating areas and satellites, and also operates other units across the North Slope, like Duck Island, Milne Point, Northstar and Badami. The company owns a share in two other major North Slope units, Kuparuk River and Point Thomson, and owns the largest share of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
The company dropped its exploration acreage in 2003, but is still trying to bring new resources online, mostly through three projects. BP is pursuing vast heavy oil targets west of Prudhoe Bay with technology never used before in Alaska. The company is also getting ready to use one of the most powerful rigs in the world to drill the offshore Liberty prospect from existing onshore facilities. Finally, BP — along with ConocoPhillips — owns Denali, a company looking to build a multibillion-dollar pipeline to ship North Slope natural gas to southern markets. BP produced 197,000 barrels per day of liquids in Alaska in 2008 and leases nearly 310,000 state acres. Current exploration focus Northern Alaska — central North Slope: The company withdrew from conventional Alaska oil and gas exploration in the early 2000s, focusing instead on developing new oil resources from existing fields, especially Prudhoe Bay. Investigating the production of heavy oil from the North Slope, and involved in a joint government-industry-university project to investigate the possibility of producing natural gas from North Slope methane hydrate deposits.
Northern Alaska — the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas outer continental shelf: developing the Beaufort Sea Liberty field using ultraextended-reach drilling from the Endicott satellite island
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