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THE EXPLORERS 2006 - Marathon maintains Cook Inlet pace Continues to sustain Cook Inlet gas production; Kasilof to come online; Kenai field gas storage starts up Petroleum News
Producer of about one-third of the Cook Inlet basin’s natural gas, Marathon Oil is continuing to develop new gas production from its existing fields while also exploring for and developing new gas fields. That was the key message from John Barnes, Marathon’s Alaska business unit leader, in an interview with Petroleum News on May 18, 2006, and has continued to be the company’s direction in 2006.
Marathon’s focus in the Cook Inlet area is natural gas, not oil.
The company produces gas from the Kenai, Cannery Loop, Ninilchik, Beaver Creek and West Fork fields on the Kenai Peninsula, and from the Unocal-operated McArthur River field on the west side of the Cook Inlet.
Development of Marathon’s newest gas field, Kasilof, is under way with startup expected by the end of 2006.
In addition to operating seven producing gas fields in the Cook Inlet area, Marathon is a partner with ConocoPhillips in the world’s longest running LNG export business to Asia and operates approximately 130 miles of gathering and transmission gas pipelines.
Marathon and its partners formed the Kenai-Kachemak Pipeline LLC to build a gas line to connect existing infrastructure to the southern peninsula’s Ninilchik field where Marathon is operator and holds a 60 percent working interested.
The company has also been successful in increasing gas production from existing fields at its Cannery Loop unit south of the community of Kenai on the Kenai Peninsula.
Marathon attributes this success to better identification of pay zones in the Beluga formation and use of the company’s Excape completion technology, which allows multiple pay intervals to be efficiently stimulated in a single well.
Excape involves making custom perforations in individual horizons in a single well — the Beluga formation is notorious for the complexity of its multi-horizon reservoirs. Isolation valves separate intervals in the well during perforation. Once perforation is completed, the valves are opened.
“Particularly in the Beluga you’ll get into tighter rock that 15 or 20 years ago was more difficult to complete — now we can go in and fracture stimulate five, 10, 18 zones at once — that makes a difference,” Barnes said.
The company is also applying the Excape technology in its Kenai gas field to help maintain production.
To flatten out production peaks and troughs between high winter natural gas demand and lower demand in the summer Marathon obtained a state gas storage lease for the Sterling formation pool 6 C1 and C2 sands of the Kenai gas field. On May 8, 2006, the company began injecting its gas into the storage facility during periods of low demand and will extract gas from the facility when demand is high.
Marathon first entered Alaska in 1954 and has drilled more than 50 gas wells in the Cook Inlet basin, its center of operations, since 1998.
The company acquired its own onshore drilling rig, Glacier Drilling Rig 1, in mid-2000 and through mid-2006 had drilled more than 40 wells with it.
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