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Modules moving to Alpine; drilling continues
Kristen Nelson
ARCO Alaska Inc. started moving modules from Kuparuk to Alpine in early March, and has about 750 people working on Alpine on the North Slope, ARCO Alaska spokeswoman Dawn Patience told PNA March 13.
Both modules and drilling supplies for Alpine are moving west on offshore sea ice road, Patience said.
The pipeline to Alpine is complete, and work this year involves moving the modules to Alpine, putting them in place and making connections.
Drilling continues at the Alpine field, Patience said, and some 25 wells will be on line at field startup in the third quarter: one waste disposal well, 12 producers and 12 injectors. Fifteen of the wells have been drilled.
In addition to workers on the slope, some 300 are working on Alpine in Fairbanks and Anchorage. Modules for enhanced oil recovery will be trucked to Alpine this year.
Exploration work confidential ARCO Alaska is also doing exploration drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and was operating at the Clover location March 13, with as many as three wells planned for NPR-A this winter. ARCO received a drilling permit March 17 for the 1 Spark well in NPR-A some 10 miles west of Clover, which was just west of Nuiqsut.
The company is also drilling exploration wells south of Tarn at Meltwater North and has permitted two wells and a sidetrack. Another exploration well, the 2 Nanuk, was permitted March 17 south of Alpine, some one and a half miles southwest of the 1 Nanuk, which ARCO drilled to 7,630 feet in 1996.
All of the companies winter exploration work is confidential, but Patience noted that “ARCO Alaska has participated in the discovery of more than 1 billion barrels of new reserves across the North Slope in the last 5 years.”
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