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The Oil Patch Insider
Armstrong has North Slope permits Armstrong Resources has received its operating permits for its Northwest Milne Point exploration program, a state official told Petroleum News Oct. 21.
The Denver-based independent is planning to drill up to three wells at two locations offshore the Milne Point unit on Alaska’s North Slope some three miles north of Oliktok Point.
The only thing Armstrong is missing is its oil spill contingency plan approval from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. The agency’s review of the plan is complete, Lydia Miner said Oct. 23. Miner is with DEC’s Division of Spill Prevention and Response.
“We will probably start the final seven-day public comment period on the C-plan on Monday,” she said.
The proposed wells — the Nikaitchuq No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 — “will target multiple objectives. One of the primary objectives is an attempt to extend the favorable productive Jurassic sand fairway which tested 1,300 barrels of oil per day in the Ivik well last year,” Armstrong Vice President Stu Gustafson said in August.
Ivik was one of three wells Armstrong’s partner in the Oooguruk unit, Pioneer Natural Resources, drilled last winter in the unit’s Kuparuk Northwest prospect.
IADC gets strokes for offshore safety The Offshore Energy Center recently inducted the International Association of Drilling Contractors into the Center’s Hall of Fame as a technology pioneer in the health, safety and environment category.
IADC said its multi-pronged strategy of safety conferences, workshops and accident prevention guides has resulted in a 96 percent reduction in serious drilling accidents on the U.S. outer continental shelf. In the 25 years from 1977 to 2002, the rate of serious incidents in the OCS plummeted to 0.50 injuries per 200,000 man hours worked from 11.83 injuries per 200,000 man hours. IADC elects new officers The International Association of Drilling Contractors’ annual meeting in late September in Houston, Texas, was jam-packed with announcements of leadership changes and awards.
Marion Woolie, senior vice president of operations, GlobalSantaFe Corp., was elected IADC’s chairman. Ed Kautz, managing director, Caza Drilling of Denver, becomes vice chairman, and Paul Bragg, president and CEO of Pride International, is the new secretary-treasurer.
IADC president Lee Hunt and vice president of government affairs Brian T. Petty were reelected to the board. Also elected were three divisional vice presidents — for the land division, Scott Gordon, Unit Drilling; for offshore, Jurgen Sager, Transocean; and for drilling services, Ross Murphy, Apache.
Three Distinguished Service Awards were presented honoring individuals for outstanding contributions to IADC and industry. The awards went to Stan Christman, retired from ExxonMobil; Bill Person, Rowan Cos.; and Richard Reiley, retired from BP Americas. Udelhoven earns Green Star award A comprehensive approach to reducing the environmental impacts of its activities has won Anchorage-based Udelhoven Oilfield System Services a Green Star award. Founder Jim Udelhoven established the culture of making each employee responsible for applying Green Star standards to reduce waste and increase energy efficiency.
Initiatives the company has instituted include a comprehensive recycling program for office and waste materials such as paper, aluminum cans, corrugated cardboard, fluorescent lamps, Nicad and Alkaline batteries, copper, brass, used oil and paint cans. Udelhoven also provides divided wastebaskets at workstations to allow employees to easily separate recyclables from trash. VECO working in Brazil VECO Canada is completing an integrity management program for a 400-mile long, 18-inch natural gas pipeline from eastern Bolivia to Cuiaba, Brazil, the company said in late September.
The Cuiaba Integrated Energy Project provides comprehensive, integrated information on pipeline assets, maintenance and inspection activities along with geographical, cultural and environmental data to the Brazilian and Bolivian companies operating the pipeline, VECO said. Anchorage firm forms Iraq alliance Shield Resources of Anchorage, Alaska, has formed “a strategic alliance with three leading” Iraq engineering and construction companies to provide technology, equipment and management training for infrastructure reconstruction projects, Shield said recently.
After evaluation of prospective Iraqi partners, Shield said it used its partners’ expertise to get equipment safely into Iraq.
Shield President Douglas Cook, who has worked in the Middle East since 1996, supervised the hiring of Iraqi engineers to install and operate Shield’s communication solutions.
Cook acknowledges Iraq as a high-risk location, which, he says, makes it a natural for Alaska companies.
People involved in first North Slope gas pipeline hoping to design new line Some of the key people involved in the late 1970s, early 1980s design of the original Alaska Highway gas pipeline have put together a joint venture called GSS/TC, hoping to get involved in the engineering and design of the gas line currently being proposed by North Slope producers BP Exploration (Alaska), ConocoPhillips Alaska and ExxonMobil.
Bill Burkhard, a general partner in the joint venture, was in Anchorage recently meeting with the North Slope producers about the possibility of GSS/TC handling the engineering design of the proposed gas line which will carry North Slope natural gas to Canada and the Lower 48 states. Although he did not reveal the details of his meetings with Joe Marushack and others, Burkhard told Petroleum News that in 2001 several of the original earth sciences group who worked on the earth sciences and engineering design of the Alaskan Natural Gas Pipeline project contacted their previous employers “to see if there would be any possibility of continuing work” on the latest proposal for a gas line. “We discovered they had essentially moved on and had no apparent interest in pursuing the work again,” he said. So, in the fall of 2001, Burkhard reassembled the “core group” and created “a new team to pursue the earth sciences design work should a pipeline project actually start up again.”
GSS joint ventured with Taber Consultants “for business support and project management expertise.” Burkhard said Taber is “one of California’s oldest geotechnical firms.”
He thinks that because of GSS’s familiarity with the “extensive” work done for ANGP it “can provide the quickest, most cost effective, and smoothest transition back into the earth science and engineering portion of the alignment design.”
Before the ANGP project was canceled in 1982, “about 70 percent of the alignment geology, 50 percent of the surface and groundwater hydrology, 30 percent of the geotechnical engineering including thermal modeling and climatology, and a substantial portion of the environmental work had been complete, by the GSS members,” he said.
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