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PETROLEUM DIRECTORY: Nabors Alaska Drilling: Celebrating 40 years in Alaska From Prudhoe Bay in the ‘60s to NPR-A at the turn of the century, Nabors rigs have been there Petroleum News
Forty years ago BP’s predecessor contacted Nabors Drilling Co. of Calgary, Alberta, and asked Clair Nabors if he’d be interested in drilling oil wells on Alaska’s North Slope.
BP chose Nabors because it was one of the few drilling companies in the world with drilling experience north of the 60th parallel.
Clair Nabors put Jim Taylor, at that time a 10-year veteran with Nabors, in charge of bringing Nabors Rig 6 to the North Slope. Taylor would eventually head up the company’s Alaska headquarters.
“The best way to get the rig to Alaska was to barge it down the Mackenzie River in Canada, across the Beaufort Sea, and then up the Colville River in Alaska as far as navigable.”
About 40 miles up the Colville Taylor and his crew ran the barges aground and waited at the landing site for freeze up. When the ground froze the rig was transported to BP’s first drilling location, some 100 miles overland to the foothills of the Brooks Range.
BP and its partner, Sinclair Oil Co., had already drilled one dry hole on the North Slope. Over the next three years, six more wells would be drilled by Nabors, with BP and Sinclair alternating as operator. One month to move a rig Taylor and his men were confronted with three major challenges: the unexpected difficulties of drilling through some 1,500 feet of sand and gravel, the bitterly cold arctic temperatures and the amount of time it took to move a rig, which was approximately one month.
The first surface hole drilled in the Prudhoe area took 51 days, Taylor said. The rigs were unprepared for and unable to cope with the solid sand and gravel they encountered. This improved somewhat over the next couple of years but remained a major problem until Nabors had better rigs built.
Moving and running casing in arctic conditions was brutal, Taylor said. The pipe rack was outside and to run casing meant having the V door to the rig floor open which allowed the rig floor to get as cold as outside.
“By today’s standards it was primitive. … The weather was bitter, but we were used to the cold,” he said. “The wind, though, was more than we were used to. We’d never drilled much above the tree line in the Arctic, but the actual drilling part of the operation was not that tough.” Fox bite and Good Friday earthquake They used Nabors trucks to move the equipment and supplies “overland to the drill site because there wasn’t anybody else that wanted to do it back then,” Taylor said.
Taylor and his men had been on the North Slope for just a few days when a roughneck got bit by a fox. “The fox had rabies,” recalled Taylor, “and the guy spent three weeks in Fairbanks getting shots.”
The next incident came on March 27 when the 1964 earthquake hit Southcentral Alaska. It measured 8.4 to 8.7 on the Richter scale.
“No one felt anything at all except for the water hauler,” Taylor said. “He came back right after it happened and said he heard a lot of snapping and cracking in the ice and couldn’t figure what was going on.”
But the Good Friday earthquake took its toll on Nabors’ 30-man crew. Two-thirds of them worked for service contractors and were based in Anchorage where many had families. “A lot of them had to head home for a bit,” Taylor said. “That denuded us of people.”
Except for a few problems with the huge snowdrifts caused by the high winds, the drilling and the construction of snow roads went relatively smoothly and that first winter Taylor drilled three shallow wells with Rig 6, which had a capacity of about 7,500 feet.
“By today’s standards our progress was pretty slow, but it was viewed as a roaring success that we drilled at all. ... The world was amazed we got it done.”
Taylor and his men worked late that first winter on the North Slope. “We had the rig sitting on pilings, so we actually operated up until probably late May.”
They didn’t find any significant amounts of oil, but BP and Sinclair contracted for more drilling work the next year.
Rig 6 was barged about 30 miles back down the Colville River to the landing site known as Pingo Beach to wait for the Nabors’ crews to return the following winter after freeze-up. Umiat became air hub for exploration During the first winter, the Nabors’ crew had had no air support, but the winter of 1964-65 Wien and Interior Airways supplied the camp periodically. The village of Umiat, near where they were drilling, became an air hub for the North Slope, particularly for seismic activity.
During that second winter Taylor drilled two more holes on the slope.
In the summer of 1965 Rig 6 was sent back to Canada and Rig 9, with 15,000 to 18,000-foot capacity, was barged to Pingo Beach.
Close to Kuparuk The winter of 1965-66 Taylor and his men drilled one well at what is now the west side of the Kuparuk River field, which was later discovered to be North America’s second largest oil field, second to Prudhoe Bay.
Although they were going deeper and some oil was discovered, Taylor said it was not the “elephant the oil companies needed” to justify the cost of building a pipeline to take out the oil.
“Kuparuk in its entirety would never have built the trans-Alaska pipeline,” he said. It took a field the size of Prudhoe Bay to do that.
Taylor ran into some unexpected problems at the deeper well.
“We were unprepared for the gravel and it took 10 times as long to drill as expected,” Taylor said.
In April Nabors finished drilling what was to be the BP-Sinclair partnership’s last exploratory well on the North Slope until Atlantic Richfield discovered oil nine months later at Prudhoe Bay.
It was back to Pingo Beach and home to Calgary to wait on the next phone call. Things getting shaky for North Slope “Things were getting pretty shaky for the North Slope from what we could see … customers for the North Slope were few and far between,” recalled Taylor.
All wells drilled on the slope between 1963 and 1966 were the same — not enough oil to be commercial, or dry holes.
“In 1966 we got a phone call from an unexpected source,” Taylor said, “Unocal, which was Union Oil at that time. We drilled for them that next winter, barely missing Kuparuk again, but we were running out of customers after so many dry holes.” Clair Nabors takes big gamble Later that winter when Nabors finished the Union well Clair Nabors took what Taylor calls “a big gamble.”
Nabors always had a “move-out clause” in its North Slope contracts, which required the customer to move the rig back to Canada when the drilling contract ran out. Nabors had had that with BP, Sinclair and Union, but had left its rig on the slope because they always had work lined up for the following winter. But this time there was no more work and prospects were “looking dim,” Taylor said. After freeze up in the fall, the rig was stuck there for an entire winter drilling season.
“Clair Nabors had a choice of moving the rig back to Canada or taking one hundred and fifty grand in cash,” Taylor said. “He took the money and left the rig up there.”
The cash had come from Richfield Oil Corp., which would merge with Atlantic Refining to become Atlantic Richfield Co. (now part of ConocoPhillips), but it carried no guarantee of a drilling contract for the following winter because Richfield had not yet discovered oil on the North Slope.
By accepting Richfield’s $150,000 offer, Clair Nabors had forfeited his right to have Union bear the cost of transporting Rig 9 home to Canada. Waiting for the phone to ring Back to waiting for the telephone to ring. And ring it did. This time it was the newly merged Atlantic Richfield, with a drilling contract.
“We got a call, the first or second call that ARCO made after the flare 100 feet in the air over there at the Prudhoe Bay discovery well,” Taylor said. “They phoned Clair Nabors and told him to put the rig on standby. The rig was about 90, maybe 100, miles away from where they wanted us to drill.
“My wife Marion and I had just bought a home in Calgary and had lived in it for 11 days,” Taylor said. It was early 1968. Opening a Fairbanks office But this call was different from the others. This time Taylor would not return to Alaska for just a winter drilling season. He and his wife were being transferred to Fairbanks to open Nabors’ first Alaska office.
“There was no place to rent or buy in the whole town. I went to Anchorage and bought the biggest house trailer in the state of Alaska and said ‘move her to Fairbanks and set her up.’ The trailer was 12-feet wide by 60-feet long.
The Taylors lived in Fairbanks almost three years before they moved to Anchorage and set up a permanent office for Nabors Drilling, which today houses Nabors Alaska Drilling. Drilling the Prudhoe confirmation well Nabors drilled the Sag River State No.1 well seven miles from the Prudhoe Bay State No. 1 discovery well where ARCO had hit gas.
“This time we hit oil and lots of it,” he said.
In February 1968 ARCO had announced that it had cased the discovery well at 8,708 feet and found oil saturated sands in the lower 70 feet; in March, the company reported that the discovery well flowed oil at a rate of 1,152 barrels a day.
On June 25, 1968, ARCO announced the discovery of oil at the Sag River well, confirming the Prudhoe Bay field discovery. Nabors later drilled BP’s confirmation well for Prudhoe at Put River.
“We found the largest oil field in the free world right below the biggest supply of gravel in the free world,” Taylor said with a grin.
“There were an awful lot of people that got on the North Slope in a hurry during that period of time. ... That fall in Fairbanks it was crazy. There were people all over the place.”
The winter that followed was one the coldest in history. But the oil men kept coming. Thirteen Hercs “There were 13 Hercs flying through the place,” Taylor said. “I don’t know where they all came from, but there were camps and rigs and supplies being flown daily, or whenever the weather allowed it, to the North Slope.”
Less than a year before, ARCO’s Mo Benson had to move political mountains with the powers-that-be at Lockheed to get one Herc to Fairbanks to transport the rig that drilled the Prudhoe discovery well.
Nabors spent the next few years punching down wells to help BP and ARCO define the perimeter of the Prudhoe Bay field.
Editor’s note: The above story is an abbreviated version of an article about Nabors Alaska Drilling that appeared in Petroleum News’ special publication, Partners.
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