Marathon Oil Co. has put its Glacier No. 1 truckable drilling rig up for sale. In a Nov. 17 email to prospective purchasers the company said that it is offering the rig for sale as a package, including the rig itself and all of its associated equipment, together with the rig camp. The email says that the rig went into service in 2000 and was recently upgraded with a 250-ton top drive unit.
“At this time we’re evaluating proposals from potential buyers,” John Porretto, Marathon external communications specialist, told Petroleum News in a Dec. 29 email.
In 2001 John Barnes, Marathon’s Alaska business unit manager at the time, told the Alaska Support Industry Alliance that, with a small surface footprint, total containment of fluids and quiet operation, the Glacier No. 1 rig was purpose designed to operate close to neighborhoods on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. The rig spud its first well in April 2000 and by early 2001 had succeeded in drilling to a depth of 12,000 feet; it also drilled a 2,600-foot horizontal at a depth of nearly 9,000 feet, Barnes said.
Marathon has made extensive use of the rig for the drilling of development wells in the company’s gas fields in the Cook Inlet basin. The company has also used the rig for exploration drilling on the Kenai Peninsula, at West Fork in 2005 and at Sunrise in 2010, for example.
But the company’s use of the rig has declined in recent years — although in the mid-2000s Marathon was drilling about 10 wells per year, that number dropped to nine wells in 2008, six wells in 2009 and three wells in 2010.
In 2011 Marathon contracted the rig out for gas exploration drilling in the Cook Inlet basin by NordAq Energy Inc. and Buccaneer Energy Ltd.
—Alan Bailey
