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PETROLEUM DIRECTORY: Geoscientists, petroleum engineers play key roles in oil development <a href="http://www.petroak.com">Petrotechnical Resources of Alaska</a>’s petrotechnical experts provide most of the oil companies in Alaska with exploration and production consulting services Alan Bailey PNA Contributing Writer
Increased activity in the Alaska oil industry by small, independent exploration and production companies and relentless pressure on costs are driving some innovative ways to muster petrotechnical expertise. Instead of trying to maintain all of their expertise in-house, oil companies now tend to seek specific expertise to tackle specific assignments on a project by project basis.
Petrotechnical Resources of Alaska LLC’s cadre of consultants excels in this new way of doing business. The company, commonly known as PRA, provides exploration and production consulting services, ranging from geology and geophysics to petroleum engineering.
“We’re really the only company that can provide full-cycle exploration and production consulting services, from frontier basin analysis to oil sales,” Tom Walsh, a PRA geophysicist and managing partner, told PNA, “and we have all the individuals with those skill sets ... we’re a kind of knowledge bank of the industry up here.”
Founded in 1997 PRA started in April 1997 as a group of five individual consultants who saw benefit from working together. The formation of the company eliminated any co-employment issues associated with contract work and enabled the partners in the company to leverage off each other’s knowledge and skills.
“There was advantage for those people already doing independent consulting to work together, do marketing together and to provide these more integrated teams,” Chris Livesey, a PRA geologist and managing partner, said. “It was advantageous for the individuals and advantageous for the clients as well.”
The company has expanded steadily since its initial formation.
We started with no contracts and we now have service agreements with many of the companies that operate in Alaska, as well as with government agencies, Walsh said. “There’s a strong network that is formed now — we have 60 people associated with the company,” he said.
The majority of PRA’s staff has amassed 20 to 25 years of experience in the oil and gas industry.
A broad spectrum of services PRA offers integrated teams or individual experts to work a wide range of petrotechnical assignments.
“We’re recognized as a leader in integrated services on the geoscience side of things and have started to build a reputation on the engineering side too,” Walsh said.
Geoscience projects range from the assessment of a complete sedimentary basin by a team of PRA specialists to the assignment of an individual geoscientist for well site geology or well planning.
“We do seismic program planning, acquisition planning, (seismic) interpretation and mapping,” Walsh said. “We have a fully integrated geoscience workstation that we can (use to) provide full-spectrum interpretation services, geology, geophysics and engineering.”
On the reservoir engineering side, PRA does well design, well completion design, reservoir modeling and surveillance. PRA consultants can also perform economic analysis to assess the feasibility of anything from a single well to a large field development project.
Frontier basin analysis PRA’s integrated team approach becomes particularly valuable in a project such as a frontier basin analysis. In this type of assignment the PRA consultants assess a complete sedimentary basin for oil and gas potential.
Depending on how much geological information already exists, PRA may send out a field geologist to study the surface geology of the basin. Geologists then integrate the surface geology with any subsurface information available from well logs. PRA geophysicists interpret seismic survey data and tie the seismic data into the geological data. Specialists may also be able to obtain and use aeromagnetic and gravity data.
“We’ve just finished a project like that for the U.S. Geological Survey, where we looked at the Yukon Flats Basin,” Walsh said. “We’re working with them to integrate our study of basin architecture with their existing studies that they’ve done on the surface geology.”
Statewide experience Frontier exploration assignments are enabling PRA to diversify from the company’s original focus on the North Slope. The company has started to build a track record of experience in the Interior basins and in the Cook Inlet.
“We’ve also added some project work in the Cook Inlet with Unocal and some of the independents there,” Walsh said, “... so we’re really ... blanketing the state now in terms of our expertise in exploration and production ... services.”
In addition, PRA is compiling a statewide database of well information, including directional survey data, e-log information and hydrocarbon production data.
“We’re loading (the well data) into our integrated system and then we can print out (well) logs or use it in the seismic interpretations,” Walsh said. “The production data is all here on a month by month basis, so we can pull rate profiles for any field and well.”
Currently PRA uses information from the database in conjunction with exploration or production projects; clients can pull whatever data they require. However, PRA plans to make the database more widely available.
“Eventually we intend to market that database, probably as a web-based e-commerce service,” Walsh said.
Support for smaller companies PRA’s depth of experience and knowledge in Alaska, coupled with the company’s ability to assemble integrated teams of specialists, is proving of particular value to small companies that are new to the state.
“They want people who know the stratigraphy, the regional geology, the production history of all these fields,” Livesey said.
PRA can provide the smaller companies with the same type of integrated teams that the larger operators use.
“When a client comes in the door and they need anywhere from one, two, three to 10 people ... we can draw from the 60 people that we have working through this office,” Livesey said. “These are people with strong geoscience, engineering and project management experience in Alaska.”
Confidentiality and reputation Maintaining confidentiality becomes particularly important when working with a diverse set of clients — PRA places top priority on distinguishing between proprietary and public domain information.
“Alaska is still a fairly small oil patch community and we work for most everybody here,” Walsh said, “so it’s absolutely critical that we maintain our excellent reputation both technically and ethically ... we’re capable of working for a variety of clients and maintaining confidentiality of their information while providing them with a versatile set of services.”
PRA also takes community involvement very seriously.
“We’re involved in the community in terms of United Way ... and involved in the professional societies,” Walsh said. Walsh himself is an immediate past president of the Society of Petroleum Engineers and immediate past secretary of the Alaska Geological Society.
And PRA’s reputation has underpinned the company’s success.
“Really, most of the business has been based on just reputation,” Walsh said. “We have just some excellent people who are called by name to work for various companies.”
With a wide client base and diversification across Alaska, Walsh and Livesey see a bright future for PRA. The company expects to continue providing services for its established clients while also gaining business from new entrants to the Alaska oil industry.
“We’re well aware of the fact that there’s upwards of 7 billion barrels of oil in the ground and it’s going to come out,” Walsh said. “We’re just in a good position to help the companies that want to produce that oil.”
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