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Duncan leaving Great Bear; Mason to take over as company CEO
Ed Duncan is stepping down as president and CEO of Great Bear Petroleum Operating LLC, the company that has been spearheading oil source rock exploration on Alaska’s North Slope, Patrick Galvin, the company’s vice president for external affairs and deputy general counsel, told Petroleum News in an Aug. 20 email.
“Following another successful exploration season, it is timely for Great Bear to expand our capabilities in a number of areas,” Galvin said. “As part of the transition, Ed Duncan is stepping down as president and CEO and will continue to advise Great Bear as a senior geologic consultant. Great Bear is very pleased to bring on Mike Mason as president and CEO beginning September 4.”
Mason has extensive worldwide experience, including three years working for BP in Prudhoe Bay. Most recently he was regional operations manager for Apache Corp. in Egypt, Galvin said.
Karen Duncan, Great Bear’s vice president corporate, general counsel and secretary, will also be leaving Great Bear.
“Everyone in the Great Bear family is grateful for the efforts and successes of Ed and Karen Duncan,” Galvin said. “Great Bear is now poised for even greater success, and that is a credit to Ed and Karen’s past leadership.”
Great Bear has also recently hired Rick Matson, formerly of BP, as staff geophysicist and Josh McIntyre, formerly of BDO, as financial controller, Galvin said. As part of Great Bear’s management transition, Galvin will take on Karen Duncan’s responsibilities.
Lease purchases in 2010 Ed and Karen Duncan caused something of a stir in Alaska in October 2010 when their newly formed company, Great Bear, purchased more than 500,000 acres in a state North Slope lease sale. The company said that it was embarking on a program of shale-oil exploration and development, similar to the style of development employed in plays such as the Eagle Ford and the Bakken in the Lower 48, using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to exploit the North Slope’s prolific oil source rocks.
The company initially anticipated drilling four wells for production tests in 2011 and 2012 in an area where the North Slope source rocks are thought to have generated oil. These initial tests would have been followed in 2012-13 by additional production test wells, to refine a well design for a development program.
The three primary oil source rocks on the North Slope are the Triassic-age Shublik, the Jurassic-age Kingak and the Cretaceous-age HRZ/GRZ/Pebble shale. The Shublik seemed particularly suitable as a target for source rock development, although Great Bear anticipated the possibility of the simultaneous development of more than one source rock interval. And the company expected to use brackish subsurface water, abundantly available under the North Slope, for the hydraulic fracturing of wells.
During the 2011 state legislative session, Ed Duncan told Alaska lawmakers that Great Bear’s North Slope acreage contained at least 2 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 12 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Duncan spoke of the possibility of a development program, perhaps involving the drilling of 200 wells per year, should the North Slope shale-oil concept prove viable.
Six well sites In September 2011 Great Bear filed a plan involving the staking of six potential well sites alongside the Dalton Highway, south of Prudhoe Bay. The concept was to drill up to four wells from rig mats along a corridor that had already seen some industrial disturbance. The first wells would be drilled vertically through the North Slope’s three source rock intervals to depths of 9,000 to 12,000 feet, with the possibility of then drilling a horizontal lateral from each well, through a source rock zone, for short-term production flow tests. Rock cores would be taken from the vertical wells for lab analysis prior to making decisions regarding the drilling of laterals.
With year-round access possible at the Dalton Highway drilling sites, the concept envisaged drilling starting in early to mid-November and then continuing periodically for about 12 months.
The goal was to achieve proof of concept over a 2011 to 2012 timeframe.
And in November 2011 oil services company Halliburton, a company with extensive expertise in source rock plays in the Lower 48, partnered with Great Bear in the North Slope source rock project.
Two wells drilled In the event, it did not prove possible to start drilling the first of Great Bear’s vertical wells, the Alcor No. 1 well, until early June 2012. Drilling started on a second well, the Merak No. 1, in August of that year. Meanwhile, in the winter of 2011-12 Great Bear shot the first of a series of 3-D seismic surveys in its acreage.
In September 2012 Duncan told the Alaska Oil and Gas Congress that the Alcor well had encountered oil, as expected, in the source rock intervals. He said that Great Bear was looking to accelerate its program, with the possibility of a development decision in the middle of 2013. In November 2012 the company said that it had completed both the Alcor and the Merak wells and that it was analyzing rock cores from the wells, as well as conducting a technical analysis of well data. However, the company did not proceed to drill any lateral wells from the two vertical wells that it had completed, nor did it drill any more vertical wells. Duncan later explained that, with Great Bear’s drilling rig contract expiring at the end of 2012, it had not been possible to continue drilling during that winter. It also transpired that the technical analysis of well data and rock core data from the initial two wells was taking longer than originally anticipated.
However, the wells had found oil-bearing source rocks in the volatile oil window, exactly as predicted, Duncan said.
Great Bear conducted further 3-D seismic surveys in its acreage during the winters of 2012-13 and 2013-14. The company has also conducted two summers of surveying in its acreage, using a laser-based technique called LIDAR to develop highly detailed topographic maps for exploration and development planning.
In September 2014 Duncan announced that Great Bear had been working with a team of geoscientists, including prominent North Slope geologists Ken Bird and Les Magoon, to assemble a massive database of geologic data, to help identify potential sweet spots for source oil development. Duncan also said that the 3-D seismic data that Great Bear had acquired was both clarifying the locations of those sweet spots and revealing a number of conventional oil prospects, thus opening up the possibility of drilling wells seeking multiple conventional and unconventional targets.
Further drilling Great Bear subsequently filed a plan to drill three wells, the Alkaid No. 1, the Phecda No. 1 and the Talitha No. 2, during the winter of 2015 in an area to the west of the Dalton Highway, to the southwest of the Alcor and Merak wells. The drilling would target a conventional oil prospect in addition to penetrating source rock horizons. The company subsequently drilled and suspended one of these wells, the Alkaid well, but has not announced the results of the drilling. The company also conducted a fourth 3-D seismic survey in the area of its leases. The drilling and seismic surveying will presumably enable the company to further refine its options for future oil development.
- ALAN BAILEY
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