Another Armstrong buy

Company purchases 72% working interest in Borealis Alaska’s Castle West prospect

Alan Bailey

for Petroleum News

Armstrong Oil & Gas Inc., through its subsidiary North Slope Energy LLC, has acquired a 72% working interest in the leases of Borealis Alaska Oil Inc.’s Castle West prospect in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The more than 92,000-acre lease block appears to lie immediately east of the eastern end of the 970,000 acres that North Slope Energy won in last year’s NPR-A lease sale. The leases sit to the immediate west of ConocoPhillips’ Harpoon prospect, within the highly prospective Nanushuk play fairway. Exploration within the Nanushuk in recent years has resulted in a number of major oil finds.

“We definitely have plans to drill it, but we don’t know the timing of that drilling yet. We’re taking the lessons we learned from Pikka and applying them there,” Armstrong Oil & Gas CEO Bill Armstrong told Petroleum News on Feb. 24.

“We are excited about our new partnership with Borealis at Castle West,” Armstrong commented in a news release announcing the working interest acquisition. “The Nanushuk play on the North Slope of Alaska is currently the world’s hottest, conventional, onshore oil play. Since our discovery of the multibillion-barrel Pikka field in 2013, the Nanushuk play has had an extremely high exploration success rate with five large new discoveries, yet the play is still in its infancy and has barely been explored.”

“We are very pleased to work with Armstrong considering their prominent successes in the North Slope over the past two decades,” said Doris Cheng, Borealis Alaska Oil CEO.

Castle Prospect trend

Borealis holds an NPR-A lease position amounting to 206,966 acres, referred to as the Castle Prospect Trend, directly southwest of ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil discovery. There are six individual lower Nanushuk prospects, including the Castle West prospect, within the trend. Borealis is seeking joint ventures, to share the cost of exploration in the trend.

The Inigok No. 1 well, drilled in the trend area many years ago by the U.S. Geological Survey, indicated a strong possibility of finding oil. Although the well was drilled deep, in search of oil in the Ellesmerian sequence, the host sequence for oil in the Prudhoe Bay field, the upper part of the well found gas with compositions indicative of the presence of light oil in the Brookian sequence, the rock sequence that includes the Nanushuk.

And testing the Brookian prospects only requires relatively shallow drilling, to depths of around 4,000 to 5,000 feet.

Borealis has been planning some exploratory drilling, starting in the Castle North prospect, and potentially continuing in the Castle East and Central prospects. The existence of a gravel pad and 6,500-foot runway, originally built for the drilling of the Inigok well, would help with the logistics of exploratory drilling.

Borealis also holds 74,667 acres of leases at its Grey Owl Prospect Trend, 25 miles south of the Badami field, to the east of the central North Slope.

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