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BP closes local exploration office; future exploration in Alaska to be decided by Houston O’Keefe says NPR-A and ANWR prospective areas; BP will eventually build a gas business in Alaska that will last for decades; former Alaska exploration manager Jim Farnsworth heads North American Exploration unit in Houston Kay Cashman PNA Publisher
BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc. has disbanded its exploration unit in Alaska. All that will remain of the group’s 30-35 people in BP’s Anchorage office are approximately nine people, F.X. O’Keefe, who heads up the now defunct exploration unit, told PNA Nov. 21.
Four geoscientists will remain in an in-field/satellite exploration group, which is being folded into the “ACT Performance Unit,” he said. They will report to Gordon Birrell.
Five people from the land department, which used to report to O’Keefe and was considered part of the exploration unit, will be moved into BP’s commercial and business support organization in Anchorage, O’Keefe said.
What about O’Keefe’s future?
“I don’t know. Right now I am focused on making sure that all the people I worked with are placed where they will be happy within BP,” he said.
Technically O’Keefe said he is part of the North American Exploration Business Unit, the Houston group that BP’s Alaska President Steve Marshall told employees Nov. 16 will now be responsible for all frontier exploration strategies in Alaska.
“Right now, I report to both Steve Marshall here and Jim Farnsworth in Houston. … I don’t know where I will land up,” he said.
Farnsworth, he said, used to live in Alaska and was head of BP’s exploration unit here. O’Keefe saw Farnsworth’s experience in Alaska as a positive sign.
Last year, BP spent approximately $30 million on frontier exploration, drilling its Trailblazer prospect in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The year before it participated in the Meltwater discovery and spent $10-15 million on the western side of the North Slope for a season of seismic work, O’Keefe said.
“It’s not so much the dollars they spend that are lost, it’s the fact they won’t be replacing the reserves they are pumping now,” a senior level state Department of Natural Resources official told PNA. “They’re not going to be able to find enough oil inside or near existing fields.”
NPR-A, ANWR and gas But O’Keefe said there are still some large, prospective areas that BP might be interested in exploring and developing in the future — areas with reserves that might replace production from Prudhoe Bay, Kuparuk and other existing North Slope fields.
“NPR-A is still a very large prospective area for us. We do have partners (Chevron 30 percent, Phillips 20 percent) out there at our Trailblazer prospect and we’re talking to them now about our future out there,” he said, unwilling to comment further.
“ANWR is clearly a perspective area for us but clearly the information we have on ANWR from the KIC well remains very strictly confidential.” O’Keefe said the decision to drill on the coastal plan of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a political, not an industry, one.
“And we still believe we have a long future in Alaska, bridging to a gas business that will last for decades,” he said.
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