BlueCrest adds gas equipment at Cosmo
Kay Cashman Petroleum News
On May 31, the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, Division of Oil and Gas, approved BlueCrest Alaska Operating’s application to install and operate a gas processing unit at the company’s onshore Cosmopolitan Production Facility on the Kenai Peninsula.
“This is simply an expansion to the original equipment in our production facility. Some of our oil zones produce more natural gas than expected in the original field design, and this new equipment will allow us to process the larger volumes of gas associated with the oil production as we grow,” J. Benjamin Johnson, BlueCrest director, told Petroleum News in a June 4 email.
The division’s approval letter to Larry Burgess, the company’s Alaska manager, said the scope of the activities as proposed in the Cosmopolitan lease plan of operations amendment were to “install and operate a gas processing unit” at the production facility on the Hansen Pad, including “a mechanical refrigeration unit and related infrastructure.”
BlueCrest brought the southern Cook Inlet unit into production in 2016 and is using state-of-the-art extended-reach drilling technology and a custom-built drilling rig to access the offshore oil reserves from the onshore drill site and production facility.
The oil wells, which produce some associated natural gas, are being drilled about 3 miles out and 1.5 miles down to reach the edge of the reservoir. Then the wells navigate an additional 1.5 miles horizontally through the productive sands.
Of the 15 wells completed in the field in 2018, 13 were sidetracks, part of BlueCrest’s innovative development strategy of utilizing a “fishbone” well pattern, with a single “spine” well running from the surface. That spine well is deviated to run through the lower part of the oil reservoir, with sidetrack “rib” wells drilled upwards every 800 feet into reservoir rock above the spine.
BlueCrest has increased Cosmopolitan oil production from 275 barrels of oil per day in July 2017 to 1,562 bpd in March.
- KAY CASHMAN
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