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XTO buys tiny piece of Kuparuk
Kay Cashman
XTO Energy closed this month on a tiny piece of the Alaska North Slope’s Kuparuk River oil field, part of a larger acquisition outside Alaska from ChevronTexaco and not reported when the larger deal was announced in May.
The Alaska purchase – one-tenth of one percent of Kuparuk – was “an incidental part of the acquisition, not something we were targeting,” Kyle Hammond, XTO’s vice president of operations for Alaska and the Permian basin, told Petroleum News Aug. 26.
The ConocoPhillips-operated Kuparuk River unit averaged 185,921 barrels of oil per day in July. Hammond said XTO’s share will be about 200 barrels per day.
He also said XTO is not actively seeking properties on the North Slope. More Cook Inlet wells XTO, however, continues to stay active in looking for new oil in old places in the Cook Inlet basin of Southcentral Alaska.
Hammond said April 1 that XTO planned to drill one, possibly two, wells from its platforms at Middle Ground Shoal this year – the only offshore wells planned for the inlet in 2004.
On Aug. 26 he said the company now has four wells planned, all sidetracks; two to three wells are planned for this year; the rest early next year.
Oil production at Middle Ground Shoal, a mature field XTO acquired from Shell in 1998, has slipped from 3,900 barrels in the first quarter of this year to 3,700 barrels per day recently. Hammond expects the new wells to have a “positive impact” on production.
XTO is scheduled to begin work on the first sidetrack in a couple of weeks.
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