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Anadarko says Foothills, NPR-A hold huge oil and gas potential Goal set to boost reserves at Alpine to 1 billion barrels; company says 160 million barrels would come from Fiord, Nanuq, Lookout; rest from new discoveries Petroleum News Alaska
Anadarko Petroleum Corp. now believes the hydrocarbon potential of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and Foothills regions of the North Slope is as great as the Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk fields combined.
The Houston-based independent also told analysts in a March 20 meeting that it now has a goal of boosting crude reserves that pass through Alpine production facilities from a current 430 million barrels to 1 billion barrels.
The Jurassic and Brookian formations, based largely on United States Geological Survey resource estimates, could hold 17 billion barrels of crude resource and the southern portion of the NPR-A and Foothills areas 60 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, Anadarko said.
That compares to original recoverable oil reserves of 13 billion barrels at Prudhoe Bay plus a current 25 trillion cubic feet of stranded gas reserves, and an original 3 billion barrels of recoverable oil at Kuparuk.
Comfortable with USGS numbers “We did some of our own number crunching and we are very comfortable with the USGS numbers,” said Diane Kerr, Anadarko's frontier exploration manager for Alaska and Canada.
“The North Slope is an empty pallet,” Kerr said, noting that only about 360 exploration wells have ever been drilled in Alaska’s vast Arctic region.
Anadarko, together with long-time North Slope partner ConocoPhillips Alaska Inc., maintains a considerable acreage position in the NPR-A, as well as a 22 percent stake in the producing Alpine field in the Colville Delta and on the edge of NPR-A’s eastern boundary. ConocoPhillips operates the field with a 78 percent interest.
The Jurassic, which extends west from the Colville Delta into the NPR-A, holds an estimated 7 billion barrels of oil, Anadarko said. Now that the company “has identified a strong fairway” along the Jurassic, the company’s strategy is “to move out west,” Kerr said.
The Brookian, which stretches across the Central North Slope east to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, contains an estimated 10 billion barrels of additional crude reserves, the company said.
“We believe as much in the NPR-A areas as we do in the Prudhoe Bay-Kuparuk area,” Kerr said. “We are looking at the oil potential in the near term and gas potential in the long term.”
Massive amounts of acreage Either on its own or together with EnCana or the Arctic Slope Regional Corp., Anadarko has accumulated rights to massive amounts of acreage in the gas-prone Foothills of the Brooks Range.
“We’re banging away … taking old fashion geology and bringing in new ideas from the Gulf of Mexico and other places,” Anadarko’s Kerr said of the Foothills. “We’re here (on the North Slope) because it is incredibly world class. And we have a strong lease position in oil areas and gas areas.”
Anadarko also holds an impressive position in areas outside of the NPR-A and the Foothills and, in fact, is close to exceeding the state’s 500,000-acre limit for onshore acreage.
Meanwhile, Kerr said 160 million barrels of the 570 million barrels of additional oil reserves for Alpine facilities would come from three proven satellite fields — Fiord, Nanuq and Lookout — and the rest hopefully from accumulations yet to be discovered.
“It is my personal goal to get to 1 billion barrels,” she said. “We’re taking Alpine as a hub and developing 40 to 60 million barrel (accumulations). We continue to fold in more satellite discoveries as we drill.”
The additional barrels would keep the Alpine facilities producing around 100,000 barrels a day for the next 10 years, Kerr said, noting that the field would ramp up to 110,000 barrels a day in 2004 on a facility-expansion project.
She said the Alpine field will have produced its first 100 million barrels by year-end. It came on-line in November 2000.
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