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Furie preparing to move platform; to arrive in Cook Inlet in July
Fabrication of the offshore platform for Furie Operating Alaska’s Kitchen Lights gas field in Cook Inlet is nearing completion, Damon Kade, president of Furie, told Petroleum News in a May 2 email. The platform, the Kitchen Lights unit Platform A, is scheduled to be loaded onto a barge at Ingleside, Texas, at the end of May for shipment to Alaska — the platform is expected to arrive in Cook Inlet in July, with completion of the offshore installation anticipated in early September, Kade said.
Land clearing started Meantime, land clearing has started at the site of Furie’s planned gas processing facility near East Forelands on the Kenai Peninsula. A twin subsea pipeline will connect the offshore platform to the processing facility, which will feed gas into the Kenai Peninsula gas pipeline system.
Outfitting of the vessels and barges needed to install the platform and lay the pipelines is under way in Washington state, Kade said. The vessels and barges will start arriving in Cook Inlet in June he said. The platform will be located about 10 miles north of Boulder Point, near Nikiski, on the Kenai Peninsula.
Furie has previously said that it anticipates that gas production from Kitchen Light will start in the third quarter of 2014. Discovered 2011 The company first discovered natural gas in the Kitchen Lights unit in 2011, when drilling the Kitchen Light unit No.1 well using the Spartan 151 jack-up rig. The company has since drilled two additional Kitchen Lights wells and has started a fourth. Although the company has indicated the discovery of a significant gas field, the actual size of the find is unclear. A statement of discovery filed with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources for the Kitchen Lights unit No. 3 well said that the well had encountered multiple productive gas pools in the Sterling and Beluga formations at depths ranging from 3,618 feet to 6,228 feet.
According to Furie’s Kitchen Lights plan of operation the offshore platform is of monopod design, with a single 18-foot-diameter caisson that will support a production deck about 62 feet above mean sea level. Facilities on the platform will include a helideck and crew accommodation. The Spartan jack-up rig will be cantilevered over the side of the platform for the drilling of development wells.
Subsea pipelines The twin gas pipelines from the platform to the shore will be 10 inches in diameter and for much of their length will run parallel to an existing subsea pipeline system, the Cook Inlet Gas Gathering System. The pipelines will pass under a coastal bluff, to emerge onshore at the surface in the grounds of the processing facility. The processing facility, on a 10-acre site, will remove water, gas condensate and sand from the raw gas delivered from the platform, thus enabling the delivery to market of sales-quality gas.
Furie has not indicated who will purchase the Kitchen Lights gas. Although there have been concerns in recent years about the availability of sufficient Cook Inlet gas for Southcentral Alaska power and gas utilities, the utilities now have sufficient gas under contract to maintain supplies through to the first quarter of 2018. ConocoPhillips has recently announced the restart of its liquefied natural gas plant at Nikiski, for the export of gas from Alaska. And Agrium is considering the reopening of its mothballed natural-gas-fed fertilizer plant at Nikiski.
—Alan Bailey
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