Fortune Hunt Alaska 2012: Still the North Slope, but….
Kay Cashman Petroleum News
Whether it’s Repsol’s recent massive acquisition of exploration acreage on the North Slope or Brooks Range Petroleum’s recent discoveries, there are still 30-plus billion barrels of undiscovered and/or undeveloped oil on the North Slope or in the near-shore state waters, running the gamut of conventional, heavy, source reservoired (shale), and tight oil.
And there are even more billions of untapped barrels of largely conventional oil in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and the federal portions of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.
But for those readers who are interested in exploring off the beaten path there are other Alaska nonproducing basins with the potential for natural gas, and in some cases oil.
Geologist Robert Swenson, director of Alaska’s Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys, or DGGS, gave an overview of some of these less known basins and their resource potential in 2011.
Alaska, Swenson explained, is traversed by several major geologic faults. The relative movement of rocks on either side of these faults has thrown up mountains in some areas, while causing other areas to sink into low-lying basins. Erosion of the mountains has caused sand and gravel to flow as sediment into the basins.
The basins formed in this way are Tertiary in age and generally contain non-marine sediments — sediments consisting of sands, gravels and shales laid down from ancient rivers and lakes. Coal seams interspersed with these sediments have formed from rotting and compressed vegetation. And bacteria feeding on that rotting organic material have created methane, the primary component of natural gas, with that gas becoming adsorbed onto the coal.
If stresses in the Earth’s crust cause folding and uplift of the coal seams, the resulting drop in pressure in the coal...
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