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Providing coverage of Alaska and northern Canada's oil and gas industry
August 2006

Vol. 11, No. 33 Week of August 13, 2006

First Alpine satellite comes online

ConocoPhillips, Anadarko Petroleum start up Fiord oil field in early August; fast-track project sanctioned after EIS in 2004

By Kristen Nelson

Petroleum News

ConocoPhillips and Anadarko Petroleum Corp. have started oil production from Fiord, the first Alpine satellite field.

The Alpine oil field is 35 miles west of the Kuparuk River unit on the eastern border of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Fiord is five miles north of Alpine. Both fields are part of the ConocoPhillips-operated Colville River unit.

The companies said production from Fiord is expected to peak in 2008 at approximately 22,500 barrels of oil per day.

Discovered in 1999, Fiord was developed exclusively with horizontal well technology and will employ enhanced oil recovery, similar to the Alpine field. ConocoPhillips is not injecting water at Fiord at this time, but will start doing so sometime later this year, Georg Sporaker, ConocoPhillips Alaska’s vice president North Slope operations and development, told Petroleum News Aug. 9, the day the companies announced Fiord had gone online.

The current development plan for Fiord involves approximately 17 wells.

Sporaker said there are “five wells available; currently three wells are open, all producers.”

He said ConocoPhillips expects to have the rest of the wells drilled “in the next couple or three years,” drilling only in the winter with one rig.

“It’s been a quick development since the 2004 sanction of the project,” the year the Environmental Impact Statement was completed, Sporaker said.

He expects “incremental increases in the oil rate … of 12,000-15,000 barrels per day” from Fiord, “producing into the Alpine facility, filling those facilities.”

“We expect to gradually increase that rate. Alpine is at 117,000-118,000 bpd” now, he said, noting that 130,000 barrels per day is close to capacity for the Alpine facilities, depending on how much gas is processed with the oil.

“We’ve applied quite a bit of technology to this development. We’ve done horizontal development, pushed some records on the slope — went out two miles on lateral sides of wells, down about 6,500 feet, out to side another 10,000 feet,” Sporaker said, referring to recent drilling records set at Alpine and its satellites (see July 30 story in Petroleum News).

Roadless to minimize impact

Fiord’s drill site is a roadless development that will be supported by aircraft or accessible by an ice road in the winter.

Construction of the field and the second Alpine satellite, Nanuq, involved more than 1,400 people over the past two winter seasons, ConocoPhillips and Anadarko said.

To minimize environmental impact, 50 miles of temporary ice roads constructed during winter were used to move construction equipment, facilities, drilling rigs and drilling supplies to the site and the nearby Alpine oil field,

Nanuq later this year

Nanuq is scheduled for startup later this year.

Production from Nanuq will also be processed through the existing Alpine facilities.

Together, Nanuq and Fiord cost approximately $650 million and are expected to have peak production of approximately 35,000 bpd gross in 2008, the companies said.

In addition to the Fiord and Nanuq satellites, ConocoPhillips is pursuing state, local and federal permits for additional Alpine satellite developments, including the recently announced Qannik reservoir and Alpine West, which would be the first development within NPR-A.

Development of additional NPR-A satellites is anticipated over the next several years.

Ownership in Alpine, Nanuq and Fiord is split between ConocoPhillips at 78 percent and Anadarko Petroleum at 22 percent.






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