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Anadarko temporarily trims Alaska staff Company cites lack of drilling plans in decision to reassign crew Larry Persily Petroleum News Government Affairs Editor
Anadarko Petroleum will be down to a two-person Alaska office by this fall.
The company isn’t planning any drilling in Alaska next winter, and it’s still searching for a partner or partners for its Jacob’s Ladder, prospect southeast of Prudhoe Bay, said Mark Hanley of the Anchorage office.
Without work for the three-person engineering/permitting crew, the company is reassigning them elsewhere, Hanley said.
“Without a well to drill, they’ll go drill a well someplace else,” he said. “If we were drilling something here, they’d be here.”
The three-person crew had been working on Anadarko’s Hot Ice No. 1 prospect that was drilled the past two winters south of the Kuparuk field on the North Slope. The well was a cost-sharing partnership between Anadarko, the U.S. Department of Energy and two other companies, targeting methane hydrates — a compound of gas and water formed under pressure at cold temperatures — locked beneath the arctic tundra.
The drill site, which was shut down this past winter, encountered some gas but did not find gas hydrates.
The workers — who will be reassigned to other company operations this summer and fall — include an engineer, a permit specialist and an administrative services staffer, leaving just Hanley and an assistant in the Anchorage office that numbered 10 employees last summer.
Anadarko trimmed back its Alaska staff last year, citing cost-cutting for the move rather than any fundamental change in the company’s outlook on Alaska. Anadarko a partner at Alpine, NPR-A With the shutdown of Hot Ice No. 1, and while the search for partners at Jacob’s Ladder is under way, Anadarko’s role in Alaska still includes an active partnership with ConocoPhillips Alaska Inc. to add satellite fields north and south of the 100,000-barrel-a-day Alpine field it shares with Conoco. The company also is a partner in Conoco’s exploratory drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, just west of Alpine.
The companies are waiting for the federal environmental impact statement for the Alpine satellites, Nanuk and Fiord, which the Alaska Department of Revenue expects will go online in 2007. Conoco is the operator for Alpine and the proposed satellites.
Anadarko has been shopping since the beginning of the year for a partner for Jacob’s Ladder, but Hanley said the company doesn’t expect to find one in time to drill next winter. The leases, which cover about 175,000 acres 20 miles southeast of Prudhoe Bay, are 100 percent owned by Anadarko.
The company is in discussions with several potential partners, but Hanley said he doesn’t expect any quick announcements. “It usually takes a while, no matter what.”
Oil and gas companies just don’t go out and drill many wells without partners to share the costs and risks, he said. “I can’t think of any here in Alaska,” where one company took on 100 percent of the expense. “You’ve got to drill X number of wells before you hit something,” he said, adding that exploration costs can climb quickly until a company strikes commercial quantities of recoverable oil. Company waiting for gas line Anadarko also is interested in natural gas in Alaska, and holds a lot of acreage in the gas-prone Foothills area south of Prudhoe Bay. But until the company sees progress toward building a pipeline to move North Slope gas to market, there is little point in drilling for gas that will be stranded. “We’re not doing anything on gas anymore,” Hanley said. “I don’t think you’ll see anyone drilling holes” until the gas line looks like it will happen, he added.
And although Anadarko will not be drilling for oil or gas in Alaska in the next year, its headquarters staff in Houston will continue looking for North Slope prospects, studying geological and seismic reports, Hanley said.
Elsewhere in North America, the company expects to operate an average of 70 drilling rigs this year, with half of that activity in Texas and Louisiana and one-quarter in the deep basin and overthrust plays of the Western states.
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