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BOEM publishes scope of CI lease sale Adopts a targeted approach that would offer land tracts in 1.17 million acres of the more northerly part of the lower Cook Inlet Alan Bailey Petroleum News
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, has published its recommendation for land tracts to be included in lease sale 244, the lease sale scheduled to be held for the federal waters of Cook Inlet in 2016. The proposed lease sale area encompasses the federal outer continental shelf of lower Cook Inlet, north from a line extending west from Seldovia in the southern Kenai Peninsula. The bureau proposes excluding from the sale the more southerly part of lower Cook Inlet and the whole of the Shelikof Strait, to the south, areas that are also within the agency’s Cook Inlet planning area. And, to avoid encroachment on sea otter critical habitat, the agency has also excluded a narrow strip of territory adjacent to state coastal waters along the west side of Cook Inlet.
The State of Alaska owns the land and administers oil and gas leasing in upper Cook Inlet, to the north of the federal offshore land tracts. All existing offshore oil and gas fields in the Cook Inlet are in state land in the upper inlet.
Targeted approach BOEM had originally proposed using an areawide approach to its Cook Inlet lease sale, conducting an environmental analysis and consideration for leasing for the entire Cook Inlet planning area. But, following a decision to use a more targeted approach to land offerings in its 2012-17 five-year lease sale program, the agency changed its Cook Inlet recommendation to this more targeted proposal, reducing the lease sale area to about 1.17 million acres in just the northern portion of the planning area. The entire planning area encompasses about 5.36 million acres.
The area proposed for leasing retains most of the area of interest to the oil industry, as determined from responses to a request for interest that the agency published in March 2012, BOEM says. The area is adjacent to active state oil and gas leases and is relatively close to existing infrastructure needed to support exploration activities, the agency says.
At the same time, the leasing area completely avoids the critical habitat of both the Steller sea lion and the North Pacific right whale; is well spaced from several national parks, preserves and wildlife refuges; and avoids subsistence use areas for Native villages. However, the upcoming environmental analysis for the leasing area will further consider some overlaps with northern sea otter and beluga whale critical habitats, BOEM says.
Previous exploration In the 1970s and 1980s 11 wells were drilled in the lower Cook Inlet and Shelikof Strait, but none encountered commercial quantities of oil and gas. Since that time industry has shown little interest in exploring the area.
The geology of the area consists of a continuation of the Cook Inlet basin that hosts the oil and gas fields of upper Cook Inlet. But the younger and shallower Tertiary strata that hold the hydrocarbon reservoirs of the fields in the upper inlet become very thin in the southern inlet. On the other hand the Mesozoic strata of the basin, under the Tertiary, attain a thickness of up to 36,000 feet. These older strata include rock equivalent to the Jurassic rock that sourced the oil in upper Cook Inlet and include older Triassic strata with excellent source rock potential. The rock sequence contains potential oil and gas reservoir formations, although the mineral plugging of pores in some of these rocks has raised question marks over reservoir quality in some cases.
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