Pikka expansion requestArmstrong says 24 additional state leases needed to accommodate planned wells ALAN BAILEY Petroleum News
Armstrong Energy LLC, operator of the Pikka unit on Alaska’s North Slope, has applied to Alaska’s Division of Oil and Gas and to Arctic Slope Regional Corp. to expand the unit. The proposed expansion would add 24 state leases to the southern part of the unit, with 17 of those leases on the west side of the unit and seven on the east side. In its application Armstrong says that the expansion is needed to accommodate all of the wells specified in a plan of development filed in a permit application to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in June 2015.
Following that permit application, the Corps of Engineers has been working on an environmental impact statement for the development.
The western section of the expansion area would accommodate up to 62 potential wellbores or partial wellbores targeting the Nanushuk, Alpine and Kuparuk formations. The eastern section would accommodate up to 16 wellbores or partial wellbores targeting the Alpine formation, the application says.
Major discovery Armstrong has previously indicated that it has a major oil discovery involving multiple oil pools in a new oil play in the area of the Pikka unit, between the Kuparuk River and Alpine oil fields. In an August interview Bill Armstrong, president of Armstrong Oil & Gas, told Petroleum News that the Nanushuk discovery, the focus of the Pikka unit, contains oil across a 25,000-acre area at a depth of about 4,100 feet, with 225 feet of net pay in 650 vertical feet of reservoir rock.
Armstrong, Repsol E&P USA Inc. and GMT Exploration Co. LLC are the working interest owners in the Pikka unit.
The unit expansion application says that the working interest owners have drilled 14 wells and sidetracks and have as a result made numerous hydrocarbon discoveries in the Pikka unit and the proposed expansion area. The working interest owners have also conducted 3-D seismic surveying and licensed some legacy 3-D seismic data for the area - the seismic surveys and processed seismic data have enabled the mapping of the structural and stratigraphic components of the discovered oil reservoirs, the application says.
Drilling this winter As previously reported in Petroleum News, Armstrong plans to drill two new wells during the coming winter, one an appraisal well for the Nanushuk project and one a wildcat exploration well 16 miles or so to the south of the Pikka unit. Armstrong has now filed a revised oil spill prevention and contingency plan with the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation to accommodate the drilling of those wells.
The contingency plan says that the appraisal well, called the Pikka No. 1 well, will be drilled by the Doyon rig 14, or equivalent, at township 10 and 11 north, range 5 east of the Umiat meridian. The exploration well, the Horseshoe No. 1, will be drilled using the All American Oilfield rig 111, or equivalent, at township 8 north, range 5 east of the Umiat meridian. The plan says that drilling will be conducted from ice pads between January and April.
The Pikka No. 1 site is on the east side of the Colville River, just outside the southern end of the existing Pikka unit. The Horseshoe No. 1 well is also on the east bank of the Colville, within a state lease that is 75 percent owned by Armstrong Energy and 25 percent owned by Repsol.
Armstrong will construct ice roads from the Mustang gravel pad to the Pikka No. 1 drill site, and from an ice staging area adjacent the Kuparuk River unit Pad 2P to the Horseshoe No. 1 site, the contingency plan says.
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