PETROLEUM DIRECTORY: Pumping up oil production at Alpine

Featured in this section are photographs by Judy Patrick of the Alpine facilities expansion project at ConocoPhillips’ Colville River unit on Alaska’s North Slope. Work on phase one of the expansion project began in March and was completed in August.

The facility expansion, approved in two phases, will allow the Alpine plant to produce as much as 140,000 barrels per day of oil, up from a two and a half year average of 100,000 bpd.

Phase one carried a $60 million price tag and was designed to increase Alpine’s capacity to handle produced water. Although it was expected to increase oil throughput by only about 5,000 bpd, Alpine production hit a new monthly high of 113,350 bpd in October.

Phase two, a $58 million project expected to be completed next summer, will increase both the oil handling and seawater injection capacities of the Alpine facilities.

Alpine is a near zero-discharge facility. The waste generated is reused, recycled or properly disposed.

There is no permanent road to the field; in the winter, ice roads are constructed to allow transportation of equipment and drilling supplies to the site. These roads minimize environmental impacts, because in the spring the ice roads melt, leaving no trace on the tundra.

Small aircraft also provide service to Alpine.

Declared commercial in 1996, Alpine was the largest onshore oil field discovered in the United States in more than a decade. The western-most producing oil field on Alaska’s North Slope, Alpine is in the Colville River area, 34 miles west of the Kuparuk River field, near the eastern border of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

Editor’s note: See the latest news on Alpine in this issue on page A9, “Interior approves ConocoPhillips’ NPR-A development.”