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THE EXPLORERS 2004: Petro-Canada: waiting on gasline, lawsuit
Kay Cashman Petroleum News
As of Oct. 15, 2004, Calgary-based Petro-Canada had an oil and gas lease position in northern Alaska of almost 700,000 acres.
But the company is waiting on two things to happen before it decides what to do with that acreage, which lies in two areas of the North Slope — the gas-prone foothills to the south and the oil-prone area close to the coast in the northeastern quadrant of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
In the gas-prone foothills of the North Slope, Petro-Canada is waiting for a definite signal that a gas pipeline will be built from the North Slope, giving the company an outlet for any gas it discovers in Alaska.
In NPR-A, Petro-Canada is waiting on the outcome of a lawsuit filed by environmentalists against the U.S. Bureau of Land Management that involves the planning area in which it won leases at a BLM sale in June 2004.
First, natural gas It all began in May 2001. Already a significant player in northern Canada’s gas-rich Mackenzie Delta, Petro-Canada decided to get a foot in both Arctic gas camps by bidding in the first North Slope Foothills Areawide Oil and Gas Lease Sale on May 9 of that year. It emerged with 56 tracts, encompassing 322,560 acres for $2,471,040, which represented 23 percent of the high bids.
A company spokesman said the purchase was “another card in our deck. We’re positioning ourselves for future exploration and development and the prospect of getting gas out of Alaska to the North American market.”
The leases had a term of 10 years without any work commitment.
Petro-Canada’s move across the border was also seen as an extension of its gas activities in the Alberta foothills and Northeast British Columbia, where “geological prospects … are similar” to those in Alaska, a company representative told Petroleum News.
The most recent gas-prone acreage picked up by Petro-Canada was 28,800 acres south of Prudhoe Bay in the May 19, 2004, state North Slope Foothills areawide sale, bringing its tally to 430,000 acres.
“What we got supplements our existing acreage,” company spokeswoman Michelle Harries said.
Next, crude oil Petro-Canada’s next step was a move into the oil-prone NPR-A.
It successfully won bids on 28 blocks for $13,614,835 in the June 2004 federal NPR-A oil and gas lease sale for the northwest planning area.
Petro-Canada spokeswoman Susan Braungart told Petroleum News that the “oil prime” NPR-A acreage would give the company an additional base for operations in Alaska and possibly something to work on “while we await news on a gas pipeline. … We’re hopeful that once the leases have been issued that the BLM will have resolved any legal issues with the leases and we can continue interpretation efforts with the data available.”
Derek Evoy, manager of frontier exploration for Petro-Canada, is in charge of the firm’s Alaska assets.
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