USGS to conduct Cook Inlet assessment

The U.S. Geological Survey is going to conduct a new assessment of oil and gas resources in Alaska’s Cook Inlet basin, USGS geologist Rick Stanley told the Alaska Department of Natural Resources 2010 Technical Review Meeting April 21. The assessment will encompass those parts of the basin that lie onshore and under the state waters of the upper Cook Inlet.

Stanley has been participating in a multiyear DNR research program, investigating the petroleum geology of Cook Inlet and obtaining geologic information to help in exploration for oil and gas.

USGS plans to conduct a meeting in September to review what is now known about Cook Inlet geology and geophysics, and hence to identify potential oil and gas plays, to act as a basis for estimating resource volumes. The agency will then carry out the actual assessment in February 2011, Stanley said.

In late 2009 DNR published an assessment of remaining natural gas reserves associated with existing gas fields and of potential gas reserves in some specific, known exploration prospects. And a 2010 study by Petrotechnical Resources of Alaska for three Southcentral Alaska power and gas utilities evaluated the economics of developing the probable remaining natural gas reserves.

In contrast, rather than evaluating known or probable reserves in specific places, the USGS assessment will estimate undiscovered volumes of both oil and gas resources across much of the basin. The last USGS assessment of the region, completed in 1995, took a broad look at the whole of southern Alaska, rather than just Cook Inlet. In 2006 the U.S. Minerals Management Service published its most recent Cook Inlet assessment, encompassing offshore lands on the outer continental shelf, primarily in the lower Cook Inlet and not overlapping the area that USGS will assess.

—Alan Bailey