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Vol. 23, No.20 Week of May 20, 2018
Providing coverage of Alaska and northern Canada's oil and gas industry

Mustang early start

State approves temporary facility installation for production this year

Alan Bailey

Petroleum News

Alaska’s Division of Oil and Gas has approved a plan filed by Brooks Range Petroleum Corp. to install a temporary production facility in the Mustang field, to allow some early oil production to start, potentially in late October of this year, before permanent production facilities go into operation. The idea would be to truck the produced oil to a designated point of sale or processing facility, until the permanent pipeline from Mustang to the nearby Alpine pipeline has been completed.

Brooks Range has been planning on first oil from Mustang in the first quarter of 2019, following installation of permanent facilities and the hookup of the pipeline by the end of this year. However, the company’s application for early production facility approval indicates that the tie in of the field to the Alpine line has not yet been scheduled.

Rented module

According to the application, the idea is to rent a modular facility that can be transported to the Mustang pad and begin operating within 30 weeks. The early production facility would be removed once the field’s permanent facilities are in operation.

According to Brooks Range’s plan, the company is beginning the procurement process for the temporary facility this month. Following the completion of detailed engineering in June, installation of the facility would begin in mid-July. Functional check out would start around Sept. 10, with installation being completed towards the end of that month. Following the completion of functional checkout and the commissioning of the production arrangements, production startup could begin around Oct. 20.

The early production facility contractor would provide most of the equipment and personnel required for the temporary arrangements. The anticipated production capacity would be 6,000 barrels per day of oil, with a gas-to-oil ratio of 1,000 and a maximum production of 1,500 barrels per day of water. Produced water will be pumped down a designated injection well or trucked out for disposal. Gas will be compressed and dehydrated for use as fuel gas or for injection in a designated gas injection well, or would be flared, Brooks Range’s plan says.

Although some of the temporary equipment would already be in the form of modules that could be trucked to the site, the contractor would have to determine what fabrication would be needed of electrical, instrumentation and separator modules. It is possible that fabrication could take place in Alaska, Brooks Range’s plan says.

Construction activities for the early production facilities will require the installation on the Mustang pad of infrastructure such as a camp, communications tower and support facilities - these items are part of Brooks Range’s existing plan of operations and will be needed in support of long term production arrangements.

Completion delay

The Mustang field is in the Southern Miluveach unit, immediately west of the Kuparuk River unit. The gravel pad and road, and some of the pipeline vertical support members for the project were completed some time ago, as were many of the modules for the field’s facilities. However, following technical issues with a development well and funding issues associated with low oil prices, completion of the project was delayed.

The field has been reported as likely to hold 20.8 million barrels of proven oil reserves. Development would involve drilling horizontal production wells and vertical injectors in the 11 fault blocks of the field reservoir. The concept is to build facilities that can act as a fulcrum for oil developments in the immediate neighborhood.

Brooks Range Petroleum operates the Mustang project on behalf of CaraCol Petroleum LLC, TP North Slope Development LLC, MEP Alaska LLC, Nabors Drilling Technologies USA Inc., AVCG LLC, Mustang Road LLC and MOC1 LLC. Mustang Road and MOC1 are subsidiaries of the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, which helped finance the road, pad and processing facilities projects.



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