Great Bear preparing to drill first well

Great Bear Petroleum is preparing to drill its first shale oil test well on Alaska’s North Slope. The company is planning to move a drilling rig to the location of that first well, the Alcor 1 well, on June 4, Ed Duncan, Great Bear CEO and president, told Petroleum News in a June 1 email.

The Alcor well, close the North Slope Haul Road south of Deadhorse, is the most northerly of a series of six wells that Great Bear and its partner Halliburton plan to drill to determine whether oil can be produced directly from North Slope oil source rocks, using techniques that have proved highly successful in shale oil plays elsewhere in North America.

Great Bear has leased a swathe of state land south of the producing oil fields of the central North Slope, with the leases located in an area where the source rocks are most likely to contain oil. The wells that Great Bear plans to drill as part of a proof of concept program for North Slope shale oil development are all located close to the Haul Road for ease of access.

—Alan Bailey