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88E to drill Charlie
Targeting Brookian Torok and Schrader, picks up Heavenly prospect
Kay Cashman Petroleum News
88 Energy is planning an exploration well in its Western Play Fairway for the upcoming off-road winter drilling season on Alaska’s North Slope. Charlie No. 1 will target stacked plays in the Brookian Torok and Schrader Bluff sands, general manager of operations Erik Opstad told Petroleum News in a recent interview.
“We’re proceeding ahead with permitting. We have most of the operational permits in place, but we’re working on minor amendments and updates to those permits as a result of refinements of the well location. The ice road to a location was originally permitted last year prior to completing interpretation of the latest 3-D shoot, but those results have allowed us to refine that original location,” he said.
Located approximately 30 miles west of the Dalton Highway and southeast of the Winx No. 1 well the company drilled last winter, 88 Energy shows the Charlie prospect as potentially holding as much as 304 million barrels of oil in place, a low of 126 million barrels, a gross mean of 210 million barrels with a net mean of 163 million barrels to the company.
A permit to drill application will be submitted to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission when the well design is finalized, Opstad said.
Also in the Western Play Fairway, 88 Energy recently picked up 10-year leases from Arctic Slope Regional Corp. in the Heavenly prospect (see map), which is where Phillips Petroleum drilled the Heavenly No. 1 discovery well west of White Hills in 2002.
In a recent presentation, 88 Energy shows Heavenly’s Torok discovery as having as much as 120 million barrels of oil, a low of 22 million barrels, a gross mean of 68 million barrels and a net mean to the company of 58 million barrels.
In its Alaska update at the end of May, the company said “good progress has been made on integration of the Winx-1 well results into the existing 3-D seismic volume. Additional data, that will aid in the evaluation process for the Western Block, has been identified. The forward program will be to access this data and reprocess and reinterpret the 3-D seismic.” 88 Energy anticipated having all the evaluation work finished before the end of the year.
Project Icewine, Yukon Gold 88 Energy said that finalization of advanced analysis using state-of-the-art technology has significantly advanced the joint venture’s understanding of the nature of their HRZ play, noting that analysis has “confirmed that the HRZ is an excellent source rock with good potential as an economic shale play. The nature of the dominant kerogen in the HRZ has been demonstrated to be prone to more rapid transformation into hydrocarbons than other shales initially used for comparison. This means that the thermal maturity window for volatile oil in the HRZ is at lower temperature than that typically seen in other plays.”
To the east, the latest news on 88 Energy’s Yukon leases has not publicly changed, in that discussions have been initiated by the company with nearby lease owners to “optimize the monetization strategy for existing discovered resources” in the vicinity.
88 Energy’s Yukon leases contain the 86 million-barrel Cascade prospect, which was intersected peripherally by the Yukon Gold No. 1 well, drilled in 1994 by BP, and classified as an historic oil discovery. Near the border of the ANWR 1002 area, the leases are close to recently commissioned infrastructure.
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