Great Bear moving toward next steps

Great Bear Petroleum, the company that has been spearheading efforts to develop shale oil on Alaska’s North Slope, has been assembling and assessing geologic, seismic and geochemical data, to fine tune its ability to find “sweet spots” for test drilling, Ed Duncan, the company’s president and CEO, told the Alaska Oil and Gas Congress on Sept. 17.

Duncan later told Petroleum News that his company hopes to drill during the coming winter.

He told the Oil and Gas Congress that the work the company has done to date has discovered oil in both unconventional and conventional plays, but that sorting out what the company has found presents a big challenge.

“We are busy,” Duncan said. “We’ve spent a lot of time doing big science to find out how to go about prosecuting our business plan.”

The company drilled two vertical test wells, the Alcor No. 1 and the Merak No.1, at sites near the northern section of the North Slope Haul Road in 2012, as part of a program that had envisaged the drilling of up to four vertical wells along the haul road, with the possibility of sidetrack wells to test the production of oil from source rocks that the vertical wells would encounter.

But after reporting the successful penetration of the expected source rock horizons and the sampling of rocks from the two wells drilled, the company suspended its drilling program, later reporting that it was engaged in an analysis of its drilling results and the results of seismic surveying that it was conducting. The company has now completed three 3-D seismic surveys covering more than 400 square miles in its leases, in addition to detailed airborne radar surveys of surface features.

Duncan said that recent research into shale oil development has shown that the optimum locations for development occur where relatively volatile oil is generated and retained. Great Bear, working with a team of scientists including prominent geologists, has been reviewing the North Slope regional geology, assembling geochemical data and using that data and the data from its seismic surveys to identify optimum drilling locations, where those volatile hydrocarbon liquids may be found, still in place in the source rocks, Duncan said.

“That’s what the big science is about in Great Bear,” Duncan said. “How we go about assessing unconventional resources in the subsurface without just drilling … looking ahead of the drill bit.”

- Alan Bailey