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THE EXPLORERS 2006 - Rutter and Wilbanks: Back to Glennallen Independent’s Alaska acreage hits 125,000; not giving up on Copper River basin gas exploration well Kay Cashman Petroleum News
It was Henry Jamison’s refusal to give up on Alaska’s North Slope in the 1960s that resulted in the discovery of Prudhoe Bay. If the same persistence pays off in southern Alaska’s undeveloped Copper River basin, it will be Bill Rutter Jr. and Bill Rutter III who are credited with the area’s first commercial natural gas discovery.
In February 2005, their company, Midland, Texas-based Rutter and Wilbanks Corp., started drilling the Ahtna No. 119 well near Glennallen, Alaska — the independent’s first well in the state.
But drilling was hampered when the drill bit encountered extremely high pressures in the well bore. To alleviate the pressure drillers had to use heavy mud to complete drilling, which damaged the formation.
“We had … skin, formation damage,” Bill Rutter III told attendees of the South Central Energy Forum on Sept. 21, 2006. “We ended up drilling most of that well with 20 pound mud. Many would say that was impossible, but it wasn’t impossible, just expensive.”
His father, Bill Rutter jr., said he was fairly certain Ahtna No. 119 was one of the most expensive onshore gas wells ever drilled in Alaska.
“We never got enough gas to light a cigarette,” he said in August 2006.
But in the fall of 2006 the company went back to test the 7,500-foot well using Cudd Pressure Control's snubbing unit, which is a rig that can run and pull tubing, in and out of a well under pressure. Rutter and Wilbanks was hoping to get through the casing to where it thought the reservoir was, some 10-12 feet past the reservoir damage, by using a tool called a Perf Drill.
But the drill didn’t work.
“They got stuck again. … They couldn’t make the Perf Drill work. They couldn’t get more than 3 or 4 feet out into the formation,” Rutter III told Petroleum News Oct. 26, 2006. “It was an expensive experiment and it didn’t work.”
Is the company giving up?
Nope.
“We’re coming back in the spring with a drill rig,” Rutter said.
Purchases Northern Lights Despite the company’s difficulties with drilling the Copper River basin wildcat in 2005, Rutter and Wilbanks hit the ground running in 2006.
Its first major acquisition in 2006 was the Northern Lights prospect in Southcentral Alaska’s upper Cook Inlet basin from Irving, Texas-based independent Prodigy Alaska.
The 36,000-acre prospect will brought Rutter and Wilbanks’ total acreage in the basin to 96,000 acres, Rutter III told Petroleum News Feb. 16, 2006.
The new leases were offshore on the North Cook Inlet anticline in water depths of 100 feet or less and were close to pipelines and oil and gas infrastructure.
Rutter said his company had partners in the deal, and might add several more before drilling.
He also said he and his partners were working to bring a jack-up rig to Cook Inlet to drill the prospect in 2007.
Rutter and Wilbanks isn’t qualified to operate offshore, Rutter said, but one of his partners would consider being the operator at Northern Lights.
In 2004, Prodigy told Petroleum News that the Northern Lights prospect had “estimated gross recoverable oil reserves and resource potential in the range of 111-358 million barrels of oil equivalent.”
Cook Inlet major focus
“Cook Inlet is our major focus in Alaska now,” Rutter said at the time of the Northern Lights acquisition, noting the company planned to bid at the upcoming May 2006 state Cook Inlet areawide lease sale. “We’ve got some ideas there we’d like to pursue, and three prospects onshore on the Kenai Peninsula we’d like to acquire,” he said.
And true to his word, Rutter and Wilbanks was a major bidder in the May 24, 2006 Cook Inlet areawide lease sale as well, high bidder on eight tracts for a total of more than $530,000.
Picks up Umiat lease In the Oct. 26 PN interview with Rutter III, he said the company was “working on some pretty big deals right now,” but declined to talk about them.
He also said Rutter and Wilbanks acquired its first North Slope lease at the Umiat prospect, which it purchased in a 50-50 partnership with Renaissance Resources LLC from Paul Craig and Pete Zamarello. Other Umiat leases are owned by an Anadarko Petroleum, Petro-Canada (Alaska) and BG Alaska partnership, as well as by a small independent called Arctic Falcon.
Rutter said his company doesn’t have any immediate plans for the Umiat lease.
The 50-50 Rutter and Wilbanks/Renaissance partnership also purchased two leases in 2006 in the Cook Inlet basin near Sterling from Monte Allen and Dan Donkel.
Total acreage in Alaska as of Oct. 26, 2006?
One hundred and twenty-five thousand acres, Rutter said.
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