Furie plans to drill to Jurassic

Furie Operating Alaska plans to drill a deep exploration well into the Jurassic, offshore in Cook Inlet this year, Bruce Webb, Furie senior vice president, told Petroleum News in a March 20 email. The Randolf Yost jack-up drilling rig would drill the oil and gas exploration well, the Kitchen Lights Unit No. 6 well, to a planned depth of more than 20,000 feet, Webb said.

Geologists have long speculated about the possibility of finding as-yet undiscovered oil resources in Mesozoic strata, including the Jurassic, deep under the younger and shallower Tertiary strata that host the reservoirs of the producing Cook Inlet oil and gas fields. The source of the oil in these fields lies within the Jurassic sequence, and much oil estimated to have been generated from the Jurassic source remains unaccounted for. But, with offshore drilling in Cook Inlet to the depths of the Mesozoic being challenging and expensive, the Mesozoic oil play remains essentially untested.

The Randolf Yost rig has been over wintering at Nikiski on the Kenai Peninsula. Furie is currently waiting for ice conditions in the inlet to improve to a point where the rig can be mobilized for the 2017 drilling season, Webb said. The rig’s first task will be to complete the KLU A-1 development well at the Julius R platform in Furie’s Kitchen Lights gas field. Furie began drilling the well in September. The well is the second of two development wells that Furie needs to complete as part of the terms of a gas supply agreement with Enstar Natural Gas Co. that is scheduled to go into effect in 2018. The first of the development wells, the KLU A-2 well, was completed and hooked up prior to starting the drilling of KLU A-1.

Furie is currently producing Kitchen Lights gas from the KLU A2 and KLU No. 3 wells. The KLU No. 3 proved out the discovery of the Kitchen Lights field and was subsequently converted to a production well.

- ALAN BAILEY