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Hilcorp applies for Seaview pool rules
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
Hilcorp Alaska has applied to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission for pool rules for its Seaview gas field on the southern Kenai Peninsula, discovered in 2019 with drilling of the Seaview No. 8 well.
The company has also applied for a spacing exception to allow it to drill a second well at the field since pool rules aren’t yet in place.
In its April 26 application for a spacing exception to allow it to drill the Seaview No. 9, Hilcorp said the well would be drilled from the Seaview pad on privately owned property within the field, which is near Anchor Point, with drilling operations expected to begin around June 15.
Hilcorp said Seaview No. 9 would be a grassroots delineation well some 1.5 miles south of Anchor Point within the Seaview field, targeting potential gas-bearing sands in the Beluga and Tyonek formations.
Without pool rules, commission regulations require, among other things, that a well can be open for production within 1,500 feet of a property line only if the owner is the same on both sides of the line.
Seaview is in an area of the Kenai Peninsula which was homesteaded at a time when both surface and subsurface rights went to the homesteader. Properties initially homesteaded were sold in individual parcels, resulting in much of the land in the Seaview unit having subsurface ownership in private hands, although land leased by the State of Alaska for oil and gas development is also part of the unit.
Pool rules In the May 20 pool rules hearing the company told the commission the Beluga and Tyonek formations are the main gas source at the field and said the company is planning just the single well site with two additional wells.
In a geologic report submitted prior to the hearing Hilcorp recommended that pool rules define the Seaview gas pool “as the interval from the Top of the Beluga to the base of the Tyonek.”
The Seaview No. 8, which Hilcorp drilled in 2018 and completed in 2019, reached a measured depth of 10,621 feet, and that gas discovery is the bulk of the discussion for Seaview pool rules, the company said. The Sterling, Beluga and Tyonek formations are generally accepted, the company said in the geologic report, to be “part of a self-sourcing natural gas petroleum system - that is, the substantial Tertiary coal measures of the Sterling, Beluga and Tyonek formations generate dry methane gas that migrates into, and is trapped within, adjacent sandstone reservoirs.”
The geologic report and an accompanying reservoir report both say that economic production will require commingling gas from Beluga and Tyonek sands and the reservoir report also says that since the gas-bearing sands are discontinuous and there will be commingling of sands within wellbores, “it will be difficult to accurately measure depletion and recovery of individual sands.”
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