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Moving forward on Kitchen Lights; heavy lift vessel expected in April
Furie Operating Alaska is gearing up to continue its Kitchen Lights gas field development project in Cook Inlet, Bruce Webb, Furie vice president for government and regulatory affairs, told Petroleum News in a March 6 email. Field development involves the installation of a gas production platform of monopod design offshore in the Cook Inlet.
“We are shooting for a May 1 installation date for the platform,” Webb said. The platform should leave Seattle in mid-April, he said. Furie had planned to put the platform into position last summer, but, having run out of time to complete the installation prior to the onset of winter ice formation in the inlet, instead moved the platform to Seattle for winter storage.
The MV Svenja, the heavy lift vessel that Furie has contracted for the platform installation, should arrive in Cook Inlet in mid-April to begin preparations for the installation project, Webb said.
A subsea gas line will connect the offshore platform with an onshore gas processing facility on the Kenai Peninsula near East Foreland, with the pipeline running underground beneath the shore and bluff near the facility before emerging inside the facility grounds. The horizontal directional drilling required for the placement of the underground section of the line should begin around April 10, with the laying of the subsea pipeline starting at the beginning of May, Webb said. The steel piping for the line was staged at Port MacKenzie near Anchorage last year.
The commissioning of the platform should happen in late August or early September, Webb said.
85 mmcf per day Furie anticipates securing gas supply contracts that would support the initial production of 85 million cubic feet per day from the Kitchen Lights field. The pipeline from the field will have a 100 million cubic feet per day capacity. Furie’s development plan for the field actually envisages two 100 million cubic feet capacity gas gathering lines, but Furie has said that construction of the second line is contingent on obtaining more contracts for the sale of gas from the field - apparently the field is capable of filling both pipelines.
The onshore processing facility will deliver utility-grade gas into the Southcentral Alaska gas pipeline network.
Discovered in 2011 Furie discovered its Kitchen Lights field in the fall of 2011 when drilling the Kitchen Lights No. 1 well, located in the Corsair block of the Kitchen Lights unit in the waters of the Cook Inlet. The company used its Spartan 151 jack-up drilling rig for the offshore drilling. In 2013 Furie drilled its nearby Kitchen Lights No. 3 well to further delineate the discovery and later reported finding multiple productive gas pools in the Sterling and Beluga formations at depths ranging from 3,618 feet to 6,228 feet.
Initial production at Kitchen Lights will use the No. 3 well. However, Furie plans to drill further wells from the platform, to prove out more gas reserves in the field reservoir. Furie would use the Spartan 151 rig, cantilevered over the platform, to conduct delineation and development drilling.
- Alan Bailey
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