Platform arrives

Furie’s Kitchen Lights platform in Cook Inlet but to be installed in 2015

Alan Bailey

Petroleum News

Furie Operating Alaska’s Kitchen Lights gas production platform has arrived by barge in Kachemak Bay, on the east side of Cook Inlet. But the platform will not be installed on location in the company’s Kitchen Lights unit until 2015, the company has announced.

Furie says that all of the components needed for the Kitchen Lights platform, for the gas gathering pipeline from the platform to the shore, and for the onshore gas processing facility for the new field are now in Alaska and that the offshore installation will begin as soon as the ice leaves the inlet in the spring.

The heavy lift vessel for placing the platform on the seafloor arrived in Cook Inlet in July, along with the template to be used for positioning the platform’s monopod leg and the piles that will hold the leg in place. Furie had planned to have the platform in place early this September, with first gas coming from the Kitchen Lights field by the end of 2014. However, it now appears that the platform has arrived in the inlet too late for installation this year.

It also appears that, although the piping for the gas gathering pipeline has been staged at Port Mackenzie, near Anchorage, since July, no pipeline installation has been carried out. Work did, however, start in May on the construction of the onshore processing facility.

Petroleum News has also heard that, for personal reasons, Damon Kade has resigned as president of Furie Operating Alaska and that the chief operating officer of Deutsche Oil and Gas, the German company that owns Furie, has become Furie’s interim president.

Winter storage?

On Sept. 16 Marc Van Dongen, port director for Port Mackenzie, told the Alaska-Japan LNG Opportunity Summit in Anchorage that Furie’s concrete-coated piping is stacked at the port. Van Dongen said that people are now figuring out how to offload the massive platform structures from the barge carrying them, so that the structures can be stored for the winter. One of the structures weighs more than 2 million pounds, he said. If the structures cannot be offloaded, Furie will have to transport them back to Seattle, Van Dongen said.

Presumably the barge with the platform cannot remain in Kachemak Bay over the winter.

Drilling no. 5 well

On Sept. 11 Deutsche Oil and Gas announced the start of drilling of the Kitchen Lights unit no. 5 exploration well, with a target depth of 3,600 meters (11,800 feet) to be reached by the end of the year. The press release also indicated that the company has completed the drilling of the Kitchen Lights unit no. 4 well, a well that the company started drilling in the latter part of the 2013 drilling season.

The offshore Kitchen Lights unit is divided into four exploration blocks. The southwest and central blocks lie in the southern part of the unit, immediately north of the East Foreland region of the Kenai Peninsula. The Corsair block lies in the middle of the unit, while the northern block occupies the unit’s northeastern sector. The Kitchen Lights nos. 1, 2 and 3 wells, drilled between 2011 and 2013, are located in the Corsair block, the no. 4 well is in the northern block, and the new no. 5 well is in the central block.

Furie is using its Spartan 151 jack-up drilling rig for the drilling. The sequence of wells drilled appears to be consistent with Furie’s approved Kitchen Lights exploration plan, which says that Furie must drill wells in several exploration blocks within the Kitchen Lights unit.

Substantial find?

The Kitchen Lights gas field development is centered on the no. 3 well. Although the scale of Furie’s development project suggests the existence of a substantial gas resource at the well location, the company has been tight lipped about the scale of its find. According Furie’s plan of operations for the development, the company anticipates producing up to 30 billion cubic feet of gas per year — each of the twin pipelines that Furie plans to install to deliver gas from the platform has a capacity of 200 million cubic feet per day.

Furie has also kept quiet about who might purchase the Kitchen Lights gas. In August Colleen Starring, president of gas utility Enstar Natural Gas Co., told the Regulatory Commission of Alaska that Enstar had signed a contract with Furie for non-firm, interruptible gas supplies, contingent on Furie having gas available and Enstar needing the gas to add to its other supplies. However, any gas supplies for Enstar, at least in the next few years, would presumably account for only a modest proportion of the potential Kitchen Lights production.

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