No foothills drilling for Anadarko

Anadarko Petroleum spokesman Mark Hanley confirmed Nov. 17 that his company will not drill in the Brooks Range foothills during the coming winter exploration season.

“We’re probably not going to have a program this winter,” Hanley said. “… We completed three wells last season. We’re trying to evaluate those.”

Earlier this year the company, with its partners Petro-Canada and BG, completed two years of foothills exploration drilling on a group of natural gas leases around Umiat, in a region that the company calls the Gubik Complex.

In the winter of 2007-08 Anadarko drilled the Gubik No. 3 well in the known Gubik gas field near Umiat, and started drilling the Chandler No. 1 well, east of the Colville River near Umiat. During the following winter the company returned to complete the Chandler well and drill two new wells, Gubik No. 4 and Wolf Creek No. 4. Wolf Creek lies about 40 miles west of Umiat.

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Hanley said that Anadarko had planned to conduct a test in its Chandler well this winter, but that launching a winter exploration program just to test one well was not cost effective. Instead, the company hopes to conduct the test, along with the drilling of two more wells, during the winter of 2010-11.

“What we’d like to do is drill a couple of wells and do the test in the same season, so we can share the ice roads and a lot of the infrastructure stuff,” Hanley said.

And the deferral of the well test should not have much impact on the time frame for Anadarko’s overall foothills multiyear, multiwell exploration program, Hanley said.

State policymakers and the public have been closely following Anadarko’s exploration program in the Gubik region, the first exploration program in northern Alaska to explicitly target natural gas. There has been speculation about whether any gas developed as a result of the program would be shipped to market through a future North Slope gas line, or by a “bullet line” direct into Southcentral Alaska.

—Alan Bailey