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THE EXPLORERS 2004: Aurora puts more Cook Inlet fields on line After repeated successes with gas, company plans onshore oil drilling campaign, looking for partners Kay Cashman Petroleum News
Aurora Gas had a busy year in Alaska’s Cook Inlet basin in 2004.
By mid-October, the company had brought two gas fields on line, bringing its inlet gas producing fields to four.
At the same time Andy Clifford, Aurora’s vice president of exploration, said negotiations were under way for a drilling rig to drill two deep gas wells on the Three Mile Creek and Aspen prospects, “each of which could contain recoverable reserves of as much as 400 billion to 1 trillion cubic feet of gas.”
And all this activity, and more, has been onshore in the Cook Inlet basin, where Aurora intends to stay.
Ed Jones, Aurora’s vice president of operations, told Petroleum News in late October 2004, that the Houston-based independent would focus on deeper gas potential in the Cook Inlet basin in 2005, as well as start looking for partners for a southern Cook Inlet oil play.
Story begins in 1994 The story of Aurora Power, Aurora Gas and Aurora Well Service — a family of companies working in Southcentral Alaska – began in 1994 when the original company, Aurora Power, was formed to market natural gas to large customers.
Aurora Power still sells more than 7 billion cubic feet per year to some of Southcentral Alaska’s largest gas consumers, but, from the start, the company’s main goal was to be an inlet gas producer, and in 2000 Aurora Gas was formed.
According to G. Scott Pfoff, president of all three Aurora companies, Aurora Gas is a niche player, with its initial focus on “gas that really has already been discovered, one way or another. … Our whole niche is to use those logs and the geology and the well control and then some of the seismic that’s been shot since, and put together a puzzle to go back in and find low-risk opportunities to develop natural gas.”
When companies were exploring Cook Inlet for oil in the 1960s, they found a lot of gas, “sometimes they knew it and they tested it, sometimes they didn’t, they just blew right through it with heavy mud that invaded the zones,” Pfoff said. West side gas focus About 100,000 of Aurora’s 135,000 acres are on the west side of Cook Inlet where it is producing gas, Pfoff said.
Nicolai Creek was the first gas field Aurora put into production; the Lone Creek gas field was the second. Moquawkie was next in July 2004, followed by the Albert Kaloa field in August 2004.
The only prospect that proved a disappointment in 2004 was Long Lake.
Aurora re-entered Long Lake unit-1, drilled by Texaco in 1973, expecting to find large quantities of natural gas, but Jones said the well was not producing as expected.
“We still consider the area very prospective. We’re still trying to figure out why this well was not successful,” Jones said Oct. 28, 2004.
Venturing into the unknown “We’re going to keep our butts on shore,” close to infrastructure, Pfoff said in May 2004. “We’re not going to be big risk takers.”
But, as the company works through its inventory of reentry candidates it will do “more exploratory type drilling,” he said.
For example, in May 2004 Aurora picked up a west side lease at the mouth of the Susitna River. It is a frontier area for the company, Clifford said, with only a little bit of well control and vintage seismic.
The Three Mile Creek unit is another example, Pfoff said. There are wells in the area, and the company is shooting seismic, but the company’s November 2004 well is “going to be much closer to what I would call a wildcat well than a simple developmental reentry…”
Chasing Cook Inlet oil play And Aurora has “always had an eye on the under-explored Cook Inlet oil play,” Clifford said in a Prospect Market article he wrote for the Oct. 17 edition of Petroleum News.
There are known prospects offshore, but, he asked, “why look offshore when there is excellent potential for large oil reserves onshore and as extensions of proven, productive trends?”
Aurora has mapped five drillable prospects with unrisked expected recoverable reserves of 400 million barrels of oil and risked reserves of 140 million barrels, Clifford said.
Four prospects are less than six miles from existing oil pipelines, two have been defined by 3-D seismic data, and all have good road access.
“Aurora plans an aggressive drilling campaign for the next two to three years,” he said.
Aurora will be offering the package of prospects to industry on “attractive terms with a view to getting drilling under way as early as the spring of 2005,” Clifford said.
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