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North Slope foothills preliminary best interest finding out Areawide sale would be held in conjunction with Cook Inlet areawide in May 2001; thereafter area would probably be open to exploration licensing Kristen Nelson PNA News Editor
The state issued a preliminary best interest finding June 14 for its proposed North Slope foothills areawide oil and gas lease sale; comments are due Aug. 14 and the final best interest finding will be out around Feb. 6. If a decision is made to hold the sale, it would be held next May along with the Cook Inlet areawide.
The Department of Natural Resources Division of Oil and Gas said in the preliminary finding that the state has not proposed any subsequent sales for this area in its current five-year leasing program. Instead, once the foothills area has been offered in an areawide sale, it may be subject to exploration licensing. The state said it may also decide to competitively lease in the area some time in the future.
The sale covers an area of approximately 7.8 million acres in the North Slope borough and includes all unleased state land between the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska south of the Umiat River meridian baseline to the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve.
There are 1,382 tracts ranging in size from 640 to 5,760 acres. The exact amount of the net leasable acreage in each tract will not be determined until after bids are received. After the sale, the division will complete a comprehensive evaluation of the lands within the tracts receiving bids to determine which lands are available for lease.
Acreage not owned by the state, already subject to an oil and gas lease or clouded by title claims will be excluded. The Division of Oil and Gas noted in the preliminary best interest finding that a significant amount of acreage within the proposed sale area has been selected by the state under the Alaska Statehood Act, but has also been selected by Native village and regional corporations under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Ultimate availability of the acreage will depend on the outcome of adjudication of competing selections by the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management.
A preliminary tract map is available on the division's web site: www.dog.dnr.state.ak.us/oil/.
Anadarko most active in foothills Anadarko Petroleum Corp. has the largest exploration position in the foothills area. The company signed an exploration agreement with the Arctic Slope Regional Corp. in August 1998 for exploration rights over 2.3 million acres which ASRC selected under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and another 1 million acres held by the BLM from which ASRC has the right to select some 240,000 additional ANCSA acres.
The majority of those ASRC lands lie south of the NPR-A and south of the state's North Slope areawide lease sale. The ASRC lands are also intermingled with state lands in the foothills areawide sale area. "So, we've got a tremendous advantage coming up in the lease sale there," Anadarko spokesman Steve Campbell told PNA in 1998.
The company's geologists and geophysicists, Campbell said, think that a lot of the oil that has been trapped and sealed along the Barrow Arch is coming off the Brooks Range. And, he said, that oil could also be trapped in the foothills area.
Campbell said Anadarko does not expect to find Prudhoe Bay-sized fields in the foothills: "You would have seen it. But what you're looking for in here are 300 million class fields." The economics are good, Campbell said, because you could tie a 300 million barrel field into pump station No. 2 on the trans-Alaska pipeline by going east, rather than north to tie into existing North Slope infrastructure. He said the company thinks you'd probably need a 300 million barrel field, or a string of smaller fields you could tie together, to make a project economic.
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