Anadarko plans gas exploration well

Anadarko Petroleum is taking the first steps this winter toward drilling what could be the first North Slope exploration well that targets commercial quantities of natural gas, not oil.

A gas field near Barrow supplies that small community with fuel, but to date there have been no wells drilled on the North Slope that targeted gas for possible shipment to outside markets via a pipeline that has not yet been built.

On Nov. 15, Doug Wilson, Anadarko Petroleum’s Alaska exploration manager, told attendees at the annual Resource Development Council conference in Anchorage that the Houston-based independent was gearing up for a 3-D seismic survey in the Brooks Range Foothills this winter, with the intention of drilling an exploration well the following year. Alaska’s Division of Oil and Gas refers to this gas-prone region as the North Slope Foothills because it lies along the southern boundary of the North Slope, which technically ends at the Brooks Range.

London-based BG Group, a 1986 spin-off from the privatization of the British government-owned gas monopoly British Gas, officially entered Alaska on Jan. 26, 2006, when its Brooks Range Foothills “participation agreement” with Anadarko Petroleum and Petro-Canada went into effect.

The agreement gave BG Group’s new Alaska subsidiary BG Alaska E&P Inc. a “33.33 percent equity share in 2.1 million acres of land in the Foothills area of the Alaskan North Slope,” the company said in a February 2006 press release.

Under the terms of the agreement, each partner owns a one-third working interest in the acreage with Anadarko continuing to serve as operator.

Anadarko has said that when it had its partnership agreements in place and was reasonably certain a gas line would be built, it would begin gas exploration.

—Kay Cashman