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Total buys into Chevron’s onshore White Hills prospect
Total E&P USA Inc. has acquired a 30 percent working interest from Chevron in the White Hills prospect, which is in the Brooks Range Foothills, 24.6 miles (40 kilometers) southwest of the giant Prudhoe Bay oil field on Alaska’s North Slope. Chevron, the operator at White Hills, retained a 70 percent interest.
Chevron acquired the White Hills tracts in state oil and gas lease sales in 2001 and 2006, and has said it plans to drill its first eight wells in a two-year program at the prospect, a program that started this winter. In early March the company started drilling the second exploration well.
In its press release Total said three wells are planned for this drilling season and that it “will work closely with the operator, to protect the Alaskan environment. A wide range of measures are implemented to preserve the soil, air, water and wildlife” at the prospect, which Total said covers about 2,000 square kilometers (772 square miles).
A subsidiary of Paris-based Total S.A., Total E&P USA returned to Alaska in 2007 after selling or relinquishing its oil and gas leases in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska in 2004. In 2007 the mega-major came back, but to a different part of northern Alaska, acquiring leases in the federal waters of the Beaufort Sea, offshore the North Slope — specifically 32 tracts for $2.2 million north of the former Point Thomson unit, and north of the Kuvlum and Hammerhead discoveries, where Shell holds a large number of tracts. (Shell has since changed Hammerhead’s name to Sivulliq and hopes to delineate and develop that prospect in the near future.)
Alaska remained on agenda Alaska has “never been an area that Total abandoned,” Total E&P USA’s Corporate Division Vice President Tom Ryan told Petroleum News in April 2007. “When we closed our office we were, at that time, finished with our last project there and did not have anything to go after, but we didn’t change our focus. Our geologists completed their analysis … and continued to work on their model,” something Ryan said was an “evolving” effort. “Alaska has never been off our agenda.”
Total initially entered Alaska in 2002 when it picked up leases in NPR-A and later opened an Anchorage office. The company drilled its NPR-A Caribou prospect in the winter of 2003-04. Unhappy with the results, Total closed its office and pulled its personnel from the state.
Since Total left Alaska in 2004, the company has sold or traded all its onshore acreage in the United States, concentrating instead on Gulf of Mexico deepwater plays.
But that’s “not suggesting Total wouldn’t look at onshore” in Alaska, Ryan said in 2007.
Total is participating in two development projects, Tahiti and Chinook, in the Gulf of Mexico, and operates two producing Gulf fields, Matterhorn and Virgo.
—Kay Cashman
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