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Oil Patch Insider Kupcake prospect worthy of first place; Pickard comments on geology south of Walakpa
If there were an award for the cleverest prospect named in 2006, Savant Alaska would take first place for its North Slope Kupcake prospect.
Kupcake is on a group of seven leases won by Patterson Shaw at the State of Alaska’s Beaufort Sea areawide oil and gas lease sale in March. Patterson is top executive at both Denver-based Savant Resources and its affiliate Savant Alaska. He transferred the leases to Savant Alaska.
Greg Vigil, who runs Savant’s Alaska operations and has said the company will drill an exploration well on Kupcake this winter. Vigil described Kupcake No. 1 as “a conventional exploration well targeting several hundred feet of Beaufortian age sediments located at a depth of approximately -10,600 feet.”
The drill site, he said, will be approximately 8,000 feet west of the Liberty No. 1 discovery well.
“Based on interpretation of licensed 3-D seismic data, Savant suggests that Beaufortian sediments have filled an accommodation space between the NW-SE trending Mikkelsen Bay and Tigvariak faults adjacent to the discovery at Liberty,” Vigil said.
So where does the name Kupcake come from? Erik Opstad, a consultant in Alaska for Savant, answered that question in an email to Petroleum News. He wrote, “KUParuk zone-C and KEkiktuk = KUPCAKE. The Kuparuk-C age Beaufortian sands are the sweet icing atop the Kekiktuk.”
Exploration drilling during the 2006-07 winter season is intended to prove or disprove the prospect, so the proof’s in the pudding, so to speak.
I mean, the Kupcake.
Pickard on geology south of Walakpa Petroleum News recently received the following email from James E. Pickard, a geophysicist currently with the business development group of Stone Energy in Lafayette, La.
Pickard was responding to a recent article in Petroleum news about ConocoPhillips intention to drill its Intrepid prospect just south of the Walakpa gas field that supplies Barrow with natural gas. Intrepid is in the Northwest Planning Area of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
At first glance you might think ConocoPhillips was looking for gas, but given the tiny local market and the high cost of operating in such a remote area would quickly disabuse one of that notion.
Dave Houseknecht and Ken Bird, top geologists with the U.S. Geological Survey, told Petroleum News the target was most likely oil.
Pickard sheds even more light on the subject. He wrote, “I read with great interest your recent article (Oct. 15) titled ‘Oil south of Walakpa?’ I was the geophysicist at Tetra Tech Inc. responsible for that discovery.
“That the Walakpa Sand may extend a great distance shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Walakpa Prospect was generated by the stratigraphic interpretation of 2-D seismic data, starting at the “Simpson Sand” in the Topagoruk 1 well tens of miles away! I followed the event updip to its truncation by the LCU.
“Note that the Walakpa Field outline ends at the coast, as did our data. We were never able to define the westward limit of the prospect or field.
“The Walakpa 1 well found a gas sand. As oil was our objective at that time, the well was plugged and we drilled the Walakpa 2 downdip, hoping to find an oil leg.
“We found a thicker gas sand still full to base. About that time, the USGS exploration program of NPR-A ended.
“The “Simpson Sand” (as Ken Bird tentatively named it) is written up in considerable detail in the report “Petroleum Exploration of NPRA, 1974-1981, Final Report, Volume I, beginning on page 91 (which I co-wrote with Chuck Guldenzopf and other colleagues at Tetra Tech).”
Thank you, Mr. Pickard.
Note: Pickard can be contacted at [email protected]
—Kay Cashman wrote this week’s Oil Patch Insider
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