TotalFinaElf opening Alaska office, appoints Alaska manager
As of the morning of Oct. 5, there was still no word from the oilfield service contractors testing Rutter and Wilbanks’ 7,500-foot exploration well near Glennallen in Alaska’s undeveloped Copper River basin.
The Midland, Texas-based independent started drilling the well in February 2005 in search of commercial quantities of natural gas, but drilling was hampered when the company encountered extremely high pressures in the well bore. To mitigate the high pressure the company had to use heavy mud to complete drilling, which damaged the formation.
“We had … skin, formation damage,” Bill Rutter III told attendees of the South Central Energy Forum on Sept. 21. “We ended up drilling most of that well with 20 pound mud. Many would say that was impossible, but it wasn’t impossible, just expensive.”
Rutter said the company was now trying to test the well using a Cad Pressure Central snubbing unit, which allows the use of a coiled tubing unit in a well with a lot of pressure. The tool being used to penetrate the casing is a Perf Drill, he said.
“They are actually drilling through the casing where they think the reservoir is, some 10-12 feet past the reservoir damage,” Rutter said.
But so far, Rutter said Oct. 5, “we’re still having lots of mechanical problems.”
Evergreen Resources finishes seventh well
Evergreen Resources President and CEO Mark Sexton said Nov. 21 that his company had just finished drilling seven of eight wells in two four-well pilot projects at the Pioneer unit in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. He told attendees at the Resource Development Council for Alaska’s annual conference Nov. 21, that Evergreen was encountering “between 80 and 100 feet of coal” per well.
The first well was spud Oct. 28.
“We’ll have all the wells drilled up by the end of this month and we’ll be fracture stimulating one pilot early next year in the first quarter and the other pilot in the second quarter,” Sexton told analysts the week before the RDC conference.
lore and develop its leases.
TotalFinaElf, he said, is the fifth largest oil company in the world.
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