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‘A million and a half pounds of steel’ Cook Inlet Energy continues assembly of its new rig atop Osprey platform; firm secures permit to drill onshore Otter gas prospect Wesley Loy For Petroleum News
Cook Inlet Energy LLC has a busy summer coming up.
The Anchorage-based company is close to finishing installation of a new drilling rig atop its Osprey offshore platform.
And it’s about to put its newly overhauled land rig to work drilling an exploratory well on its Otter natural gas prospect on the inlet’s west side.
Cook Inlet Energy is a subsidiary of Miller Energy Resources, a publicly traded independent based in Huntsville, Tenn.
Heavy lifting
David Hall, Cook Inlet Energy chief executive, told Petroleum News in a May 21 interview that assembly of the company’s new Rig 35 is “coming together quite nicely.”
Setting up the rig on the Osprey platform has been a major undertaking.
“It’s over a million and a half pounds of steel,” Hall said.
Voorhees Equipment and Consulting Inc. fashioned the $19.5 million rig in Houston. It’s a 2,000-horsepower National 1320 model.
A Voorhees crew is assembling the rig with the help of some local contractors, Hall said.
All the rig components are on the platform, and the derrick is up. Full assembly will take “a few weeks” to complete, he said, and the rig is subject to an Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission inspection.
Cook Inlet Energy is having a third-party safety audit done, which should speed up the AOGCC process, Hall said.
Once the rig passes inspection, he said, “we’ll immediately put it to work.”
Series of workovers planned Osprey is the newest and southernmost of the 16 platforms in Cook Inlet. It sits in the Redoubt unit.
It was in “lighthouse mode” and in danger of becoming a ward of the state when Cook Inlet Energy acquired the platform in late 2009. Its previous operator, Pacific Energy Resources Ltd., had filed for bankruptcy.
The first order of business for the new rig will be to swap out the electric submersible pump, or ESP, in the RU-1 well, which currently is shut-in.
After that, the rig will tackle a series of sidetracks to bring four more idle wells back onstream. These wells have problems such as collapsed casings, Hall said. A sidetrack is a secondary wellbore drilled to go around an unusable section of the original wellbore.
At present, only one well, the RU-7, is producing on Osprey.
“It’s a little trooper,” Hall said, producing 230 barrels of oil equivalent per day. And that’s with the company operating the well conservatively, running the ESP at minimum speed.
The Otter prospect The AOGCC on May 11 approved an exploratory drilling permit for the Otter No. 1 well.
The Otter prospect is northwest of the Beluga gas field on the west side of Cook Inlet.
“It’s a nice prospect,” Hall said. “It’s one we’ve been eying for a while.”
Cook Inlet Energy plans to use its Rig 34 on the Otter well. It’s a truck-mounted Atlas Copco RD20 model the company heavily modified to accommodate a blowout preventer underneath. The rig also has eight add-on modules to house the mud system and other equipment.
The rig is designed for rapid mobilization and demobilization, Hall said.
The Otter No. 1 will be a vertical well to a planned total depth of 7,000 feet, he said.
At the state’s May 16 Cook Inlet areawide lease sale, Cook Inlet Energy put down $2.72 million in winning bids on 74,880 acres.
Aside from the Redoubt unit, the company also operates the West McArthur River oil field. It also holds three state exploration licenses covering about 580,147 acres in the Susitna basin north of Cook Inlet.
Cook Inlet Energy has total oil production of a little over 1,000 barrels per day.
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