Interim Northstar tract participations approved

The state of Alaska has approved Northstar interim unit tract participations, an interim determination of ownership of the oil produced from the Beaufort Sea field.

The Alaska Department of Natural Resources, Division of Oil and Gas, said May 16 that Northstar operator BP Exploration (Alaska) proposed interim participations for the Northstar participating area in January and supplied supplemental data in February.

There are both state and federal tracts at Northstar and a joint state-federal Northstar reservoir modeling team reviewed the data and recommended proposed interim participations to the director of the Division of Oil and Gas and the regional supervisor of the Minerals Management Service in April.

A final redetermination will be made after four years of production from Northstar.

The joint team has requested meetings with BP's subsurface team over the next three years to define methodologies that BP will use to develop final unit tract participations. The joint team said periodic staff level meetings would enable it to act more quickly to issue recommendations to the commissioner and the regional supervisor on BP's proposed final redetermination.

The Northstar participating area is 82.16 percent on state and 17.84 percent on federal leases. BP has 98.58 percent of the participating area acreage; Murphy Exploration (Alaska) has 1.42 percent.