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Phillips begins construction work
to tie in Kuparuk satellite at Palm Drill site 3S five miles west of drill site 3G; pipelines, gravel road, trunk and lateral style drilling pad will put 35 million barrel accumulation in production by year end By Kristen Nelson PNA Editor-in-Chief
Weather and permits came together in late January enabling Phillips Alaska Inc. to begin the construction work needed to tie in the 35 million barrel accumulation the company announced last year at its Palm exploration well west of the Kuparuk River unit.
Chris Alonzo of Phillips, staff engineer for the company’s Satellites Group, told PNA Jan. 28 that construction activity kicked off that day after the company received the last of its permits for the project. Tundra travel has been a problem because of early heavy snow cover on the slope, but Alonzo said the area near the coast has been cold enough that Phillips was cleared for tundra travel for this project Jan. 24.
Palm is being developed as a single new Kuparuk Central Processing Facility 3 drill site. Approximately five miles of pipelines and gravel road, including a bridge over Kalubik Creek, will connect the new drill site, 3S, to Kuparuk drill site 3G.
Alonzo said the cost of the project, including environmental studies, facilities construction and drilling, is about $115 million. Gravel work, power cable Major construction activity will take place over the next three to four months as the pipeline and road are built, followed by on-pad work and drilling beginning in October.
There are two starting points for this project, Alonzo said: drill site 3G and mine site F, south of 3G. Two ice roads will be built: one from the mine site for gravel hauling and one from 3G to 3S for pipeline construction. Ice will also be put in to support bridge construction at Kalubik Creek and at drill site 3G for equipment storage. Lodging for workers will be at the main Kuparuk camp.
Construction starts with the power cable, which is being buried in the roadbed, Alonzo said. The power line goes in first, he said, then gravel will be placed over that and the ice road built for pipeline construction.
The vertical support members and three pipelines (water, miscible injectant and crude oil) will be installed this winter.
In addition to development work for the new 3S drill site, this project also includes extending the miscible injectant line from drill site 3G back to drill site 3F, Alonzo said, allowing MI to be injected at the 3G drill site for enhanced oil recovery. “It’s an opportunity for the project to share the costs, so it was a win-win for 3G,” he said. Pad work After the gravel is laid for the pad, vertical support members will be put in for equipment that will be placed on the pad and electrical tie-in work will be done.
“You’re basically preparing the pad so that when you bring the modules up you can place them on their VSMs and start the interconnect work,” Alonzo said.
Module construction will start in early February and the modules will go out to the pad early in the summer, as soon as they are completed, while the road is still frozen, Alonzo said, to allow time for tie-in work that needs to be done on the pad.
The rig will go out to the pad in October.
But first the road will sit over the summer, Alonzo said: “There’s still quite a bit of ice in the road and we would like it to drain and not have a lot of traffic on it. So we’re planning on minimizing traffic this summer on the road.” Mine work There were problems with gravel at the Meltwater development and Alonzo said Phillips has taken another look at the quality control for its gravel work, “packing it appropriately and … redesigning the QC process on our roads and pads.”
The gravel for the 3S road and drill site is the same gravel Phillips used at Tarn, and the company is opening up a new cell at mine site F for this project, so mining is required before any gravel is moved, Alonzo said.
“We’re going back to one of our original mine sites at Kuparuk. And we’ve done quite a bit more extensive sampling of that mine site to ensure that we’ve got what we believe we have out there. We have spent some additional dollars this summer on more additional drilling and more sampling,” he said.
The goal, Alonzo said, “is to build a high-quality road that you don’t have to spend a lot of additional dollars on the next year and outlying years. So we’re spending a little bit more money on building the road, making sure that we do a good job of it.” October drilling Once the rig is moved out to the drill site in October, drilling will begin immediately. The pad design accommodates 26 wells, but Alonzo said the current plan is for 20 wells, the exploration well plus 19 new wells. The 20 include 12 producers and eight water injectors.
The drilling pad is being built around the exploration well, the Palm 1-A. Alonzo said that with the Palm 1-A well available, it can be brought back on line as soon as the equipment and the pad are complete: “As soon as all of the on-pad work is completed, we’ll bring that well on, and then each well as soon as we’re finished drilling it.”
Production from the 3S drill site is expected to peak at 16,000 barrels per day in 2003-2004.
Environmental considerations The pipelines for drill site 3S will be elevated at seven feet to ensure passage for caribou, Alonzo said.
The burial of the power cable in the road is also being done to meet environmental concerns. This is a bird-nesting area, he said, and there are threatened species in the area, so agencies requested that the power cable be buried in the roadbed.
The power comes from the Kuparuk field generation facilities on existing overhead lines out to drill site 3G. From there to drill site 3S, the power cable will be buried.
A buried cable is harder to fix if there are problems, so backup systems had to be included at the drilling pad. Minimal pad layout Drill site 3S follows the Meltwater design, trunk and lateral, minimizing the amount of acreage on the tundra, Alonzo said.
But the oil at drill site 3S is different than the oil at Meltwater.
Meltwater oil has paraffin, and because of the paraffin Meltwater needs jet pumps in the wells. The oil at 3S is a standard Kuparuk crude, he said, “so we don’t have any paraffin problems.”
The 3S drill site “is truly a Kuparuk extension,” Alonzo said: “This is a Kuparuk sand, it’s a C sand. Very similar oil qualities to the main field. Actually a little bit improved: we are higher up structurally, so it’s got a little higher API gravity than you see in some of the main Kuparuk fields.”
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