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First oil at Mustang by early September, says Bart Armfield
Kay Cashman Petroleum News
With approvals and permits in place, the first small independent to take an oil field from discovery to production on the North Slope should be delivering oil into the trans-Alaska pipeline by early September.
Brooks Range Petroleum Corp. has been working for seven years to bring the Mustang project in the Southern Miluveach unit into production and is now waiting on just one thing: According to a July 2 email from Bart Armfield, BRPC president and CEO, the company is “making significant progress with the Mustang project, but still have components of the process facility being fabricated at NANA. We are hopeful that we can manage the schedule and get our first oil by the first part of September.”
In ‘billion-dollar fairway’ Mustang is the first development in the Southern Miluveach unit, which sits in the increasingly crowded “billion-dollar fairway,” which was ARCO Alaska’s description of the land between the Kuparuk River unit and the Colville River unit, both now operated by ARCO’s successor, ConocoPhillips.
BRPC discovered the Mustang oil field in 2012 but a series of technical, economic and logistical complications led to years of delays, requiring alternative approaches to development.
To avoid losing the unit and its leases to expiration, BRPC successfully applied for certification of an existing well and proposed a plan to start production in the short term by connecting a 6,000-barrel-per-day Early Production Facility to the nearby Alpine Pipeline.
The company had originally planned to start the field using permanent 15,000-bpd production facilities. However, that plan was based on a $120 oil price in 2014.
Following the subsequent oil price crash, BRPC had to put the project into “warm standby” mode before coming up with the plan to install the modestly priced temporary production facility.
The idea was to start production at relatively low rates and then, as production ramped up, use the revenue to upgrade the production facilities to a larger scale.
Production will start at about 1,000 barrels per day, using a single well. Then, during this year, the company will drill a 6,000-foot lateral sidetrack from a partially completed well, thus enabling an additional 2,000 to 3,000 bpd of production.
The drilling of two more wells should then elevate total production to about 6,000 bpd, likely by the end of the year.
Total eventual field development would result in about 17 injection and production wells, Armfield told Petroleum News in April.
Continuation of Kuparuk C, A sands In a recent filing with the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, Lawrence Vendl, BRPC’s exploration and subsurface development manager, said the Kuparuk oil pool within the Southern Miluveach unit is a continuation of Kuparuk C and A sands in the Kuparuk River unit, and lies between minus 5,800 feet true vertical depth subsea and minus 6,400 feet TVDSS.
BRPC is the unit operator. Working interest owners are Alaska Venture Capital Group, Brooks Range Petroleum Corp., Caracol Petroleum, Mustang Operations Center 1, Mustang Road, Nabors Drilling Technologies USA and TP North Slope Development.
- KAY CASHMAN
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