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Fortune Hunt Alaska 2012: Still the North Slope, but….
Kay Cashman Petroleum News
Whether it’s Repsol’s recent massive acquisition of exploration acreage on the North Slope or Brooks Range Petroleum’s recent discoveries, there are still 30-plus billion barrels of undiscovered and/or undeveloped oil on the North Slope or in the near-shore state waters, running the gamut of conventional, heavy, source reservoired (shale), and tight oil.
And there are even more billions of untapped barrels of largely conventional oil in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and the federal portions of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.
But for those readers who are interested in exploring off the beaten path there are other Alaska nonproducing basins with the potential for natural gas, and in some cases oil.
Geologist Robert Swenson, director of Alaska’s Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys, or DGGS, gave an overview of some of these less known basins and their resource potential in 2011.
Alaska, Swenson explained, is traversed by several major geologic faults. The relative movement of rocks on either side of these faults has thrown up mountains in some areas, while causing other areas to sink into low-lying basins. Erosion of the mountains has caused sand and gravel to flow as sediment into the basins.
The basins formed in this way are Tertiary in age and generally contain non-marine sediments — sediments consisting of sands, gravels and shales laid down from ancient rivers and lakes. Coal seams interspersed with these sediments have formed from rotting and compressed vegetation. And bacteria feeding on that rotting organic material have created methane, the primary component of natural gas, with that gas becoming adsorbed onto the coal.
If stresses in the Earth’s crust cause folding and uplift of the coal seams, the resulting drop in pressure in the coal...
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S U B S C R I B E
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ENS pearls about to be strung
It has been more than 20 years since Alaska’s Division of Oil and Gas officials coined the phrase “string of pearls” for the infrastructure-led exploration of the eastern North Slope. It has taken two more decades for the “string” — a metaphor for new pipelines — to come close to making its way from Pump Station 1 of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline at Prudhoe Bay to the border of ANWR’s 1002 area, some 60 miles east.
Between ANWR and Endicott are numerous on- and offshore discoveries, several of which are thought to hold upwards of 100 million barrels of oil.
Not all are under lease, although that might change in the State of Alaska’s annual areawide lease sales for the North Slope and Beaufort Sea, scheduled to occur sometime this fall.
First ‘pearl’ is Badami Thirty-five miles east of Prudhoe Bay, the first “pearl” on the string is the Badami oil field. Put online in 1998 it is the farthest east development along Alaska’s northern coast, its 35,000-barrel-per-day pipeline, or “string,” connecting it to the Endicott field.
Today Badami produces a steady 1,300-1,500 barrels per month, leaving considerable space for third-party shippers.
By late 2016, it will likely be transporting oil and natural gas condensate from ExxonMobil’s Point Thomson field, at its peak expected to produce 10,000 barrels a day from a gas-cycling development, and leaving two-thirds of the line open — and twice that amount open in the 22-mile, 70,000 barrel a day pipeline from between Badami and Point Thomson, the next pearl in the chain.
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