Rutter and Wilbanks puts hold on wildcat near Glennallen, building gravel pad

In the March 20 edition, Petroleum News reported that Rutter and Wilbanks Corp. hoped to complete its winter gas exploration drilling operations in Alaska’s Copper River basin by the end of March.

But the Texas-based independent elected to halt drilling and build a gravel pad before commencing operations, Bill Rutter III told Petroleum News April 20.

“We made a strategic call to move everything off the pad and haul in gravel,” Rutter said. The company is switching to “summer operations” mode.

Rutter expected the gravel pad to be completed sometime in the last week of April and sidetrack drilling at Ahtna No. 119 to be under way by May 1.

“We’ve been getting a lot of high pressure kicks and the ice pad started melting. This (switch to summer operations mode) will take the pressure off us,” he said.

Rutter thinks the company is 100 to 300 hundred feet away from its first target zone. “A lot of people would have walked away from this well, but we’ve … seen enough to encourage us to keep going.”

The company started drilling the well in February, but encountered high geologic pressures at a depth of 1,200 feet, shallower than expected, company officials said in early March.

Rutter said an old Amoco well about a mile and a half away had tipped the company to expect high pressures, but not at depths as shallow as 1,200 feet.

“Technically the challenge is that the pressure is approximately the same as the frac gradient of the rock. … We’ve had to fight this every step of the way,” he said, “but we’ve got the right people and the right equipment to do the job.”

Rutter expects to be able to complete the well within a week or two of drilling commencement.

But, he pointed out, Amoco spent “seven months out there. That well just ate their lunch.”

The Amoco well was “not the same fault block and a different geological setting,” Rutter said. “But we’ve had the same rocks and the same problems; just at different depths.”

At a proposed 7,500 feet, the Rutter and Wilbanks well, which is located 12 miles west of Glennallen, will be the deepest ever drilled in the area.

“The problems we’re running into aren’t unheard of; they’re just tough problems. Technically challenging, but not insurmountable,” he said, noting the additional cost could run as much as $2.5 million.

—Petroleum News