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State partly approves Oooguruk expansion Agrees expanded Nuiqsut participating area is justified but wants to see plan for more development drilling in additional acreage Alan Bailey Petroleum News
Alaska’s Division of Oil and Gas has approved in part an application by Pioneer Natural Resources to expand the Nuiqsut participating area in the Oooguruk oil field in the nearshore waters of the Beaufort Sea, offshore the North Slope. The state says that it agrees that the requested expansion region for the participating area includes acreage likely to be capable of contributing to the production of hydrocarbons, but that Pioneer’s plan of development does not commit to drilling in the entire region. Because of this lack of sufficient drilling commitment, it would not be in the state’s interest to grant the entirety of the requested expansion, Bill Barron, director of the Division of Oil and Gas, wrote in the division’s approval document for the expansion.
“Therefore, under this decision, the division is approving 800 acres of the proposed 1,040 acres, adding an additional 120 unrequested acres, and denying the remaining undrilled 240-acre area proposed for expansion,” Barron said.
The total size of the approved expansion area is, thus, 920 acres.
Three pools The Oooguruk field contains three producing oil pools. The deepest is the Nuiqsut, broadly equivalent to the reservoir sands of the nearby Alpine field. Above the Nuiqsut lies the Kuparuk C, equivalent to one of the producing sands in the Kuparuk River field. The shallowest pool, in the Torok formation, is equivalent to the reservoir of the Nanuq satellite field at Alpine.
A participating area, somewhat equivalent to an oil or gas reservoir, defines an area within which hydrocarbon production takes place under the defined structure of the participating ownership interests of an oil and gas unit.
The Oooguruk field went into production in June 2008 from an artificially constructed gravel island. Initial development focused on the Nuiqsut and the Kuparuk, while the Torok has seen recent development efforts in the form of a project called “Nuna.” The state previously approved a 2,400-acre expansion of the Nuiqsut participating area in May 2013.
The state’s new participating area expansion approval document says that Pioneer has been able to optimize its well designs to extend the reach of the drilling from the Oooguruk island to more distant parts of the Nuiqsut reservoir, thus driving a need for a larger participating area. This most recent expansion is to the southwest of the existing participating area, the document says.
As in the Alpine field, the Nuiqsut reservoir tends to consist of relatively fine-grained sediments that tend to inhibit the flow of oil towards production wells. But with the oil in the Nuiqsut being thicker and heavier than in Alpine, Pioneer has had to try a variety of development techniques to boost production rates to acceptable levels. Those techniques have included the injection of a mixture of glycol and water for enhanced oil recovery, the use of horizontal wells and the use of multi-stage hydraulic fracturing.
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