|
Phillips drilling at Hunter Ice roads not built to these sites: rigs and camps brought in on rollagons, some 150 loads to Hunter alone; Anadarko spuds Altamura Patricia Jones Special to Petroleum News Alaska
When Phillips Petroleum says it’s a tight hole, they really mean tight. An early March media tour to the Hunter well, about 40 miles west of the Alpine oil field in NPR-A, provided an inside look at the Nabors Alaska drill rig 16-E working the remote site and a generalized briefing about exploration west of the Colville River, but no glimpses of what operators have found.
During the tour of the drill rig, even computerized monitors at the driller’s control station were covered with oil-spill absorbent pads, blocking any view of such downhole information.
“It’s a wildcat hole, some distance from any other tests in NPR-A,” said Greg Wilson, Phillip’s geologist on-site during the March 6 tour of Hunter. “We encountered some unexpected 3-D seismic here.”
Other than to talk about logistics of operating at Hunter, Phillips remained tight-lipped about the project, one of up to 10 exploration wells the company has planned for this winter season on the North Slope. $50 million on exploration Phillips will spend roughly $50 million this year on North Slope exploration, which includes exploration drilling and seismic gathering, said spokeswoman Dawn Patience. She declined to break down costs for each individual well, or to put a specific price tag on the Hunter well.
“It’s really difficult to put a number on it until the end of the season,” she said. “And especially with a wildcat, the costs are part of the proprietary information — there’s concern about any competitor gaining an advantage from that information.”
Located about 12 miles from the Rendezvous A and Rendezvous 2 wells drilled a year ago, Hunter is west of most of the eight exploration wells completed by BP Exploration Alaska and Phillips during the last two seasons in NPR-A.
Only the two BP-operated Trailblazer wells, located some 20 miles northwest and just a few miles from Harrison Bay, are farther away from existing oil field infrastructure. BP decided not to conduct further drilling in NPR-A this season, saying publicly that the company wants to take more time evaluating data from those wells before spending more on exploration in the petroleum reserve. Discoveries announced last year While discussing only the logistics of exploration drilling at Hunter, last week’s briefing by Philllips did include a geological description and information about the six wells drilled a year ago, which are 12 to 24 miles away.
Five of six exploration wells that Phillips and partner Anadarko Petroleum drilled in early 2001, which were spread out over a 12-mile wide section of NPR-A, hit oil or gas and condensates.
Phillips and Anadarko announced flow rates for two of those five wells. In a stimulated test, where the formation is fractured using pressurized liquids, the Spark 1A produced a flow of 1,550 barrels per day of liquid hydrocarbons and 25.5 million cubic feet per day of gas.
Patience said crews ran out of time last season to stimulate the second well, Rendezvous A. Even so, in an unstimulated test, that well flowed at 360 barrels per day of liquid hydrocarbons and 6.6 million cubic feet per day of gas. Is project commercial? Drilling at Lookout 2 and Mitre 1, located in the same general area as last year’s successful probes, will help Phillips and Anadarko determine more about the accumulation.
“We have to determine for ourselves if we have a commercial project — a stand-alone project or something that could be piped to Alpine,” Wilson said.
The formation is of the Jurassic period, “…a little younger than Prudhoe Bay and a little older than Kuparuk,” Wilson said. “Wells drilled in the 2000-20001 season were Alpine-type targets.”
One shouldn’t anticipate similar results at Hunter, Patience said. “Hunter may be something totally different,” she said.
Declining to say exactly what depth the Hunter well will probe, Wilson did say permits allow for a 9,400-foot hole at the site. And Phillips’ company man on site, Bobby Morrison, said that “depending on results,” a sidetrack might be drilled off the Hunter well this season.
“Getting here was the challenge,” he added. Rollagon logistics The 120-foot tall Nabors drill rig, 16E, was broken down from its 24,000 square foot footprint into components small enough to fit onto a Hercules cargo aircraft, said Clyde Treybig, quality and marketing manager for Nabors.
“In the Herc mode, they are 8 feet wide, 8 feet tall and up to 50 feet long,” he said. “The maximum weight is about 50,000 pounds for each piece.”
Rather than air-lifting the 100 loads of drill rig into Hunter, the components were loaded on CATCO rollagons, vehicles that operate with large, low-pressure tires which do not require construction of ice roads.
Phillips received permission from state regulators Jan. 24 to operate the rollagons on the tundra, which started the convoy from Meltwater to Hunter.
In addition to the 100 loads for the drill rig, camp and support facilities accounted for another 48 loads on the rollagons, Treybig said. Each trip took about eight hours for the 52-mile trip.
Drill crews began reassembling the rig Feb. 23, and drilling began less than two weeks later, Morrison said. “It takes a lot of pre-planning before we come out here,” he added.
Crews and supplies are flown in using either a twin Otter or a Casa aircraft. No ice roads have been constructed to Hunter.
“This could be the model for this type of exploration, getting by without constructing ice roads,” Wilson said.
Exploration drilling will stop in early April, as the Nabors rig must be broken down and moved out of NPR-A before the spring melt. Altamura has spud Anadarko, a partner in Hunter and the other Phillips-operated exploration wells in NPR-A, also set up a rollagon-transportation system for another Nabors drill rig that is currently working on the company’s Altamura well.
With a 100 percent interest in that property, drilling Altamura brings Anadarko into a new role on the North Slope, as an operator. During the company’s 10-year history of work in northern Alaska, Anadarko has partnered with other companies as a minority shareholder. Most notable is the company’s 22 percent interest in the Alpine field.
Hoping for another success story like Alpine, Anadarko started drilling at Altamura on March 10, said Mark Hanley, Anadarko’s public affairs manager for Alaska.
Altamura, an oil target, is located 40 miles by rollagon trail from Kuparuk, where the Nabors rig 14E was initially broken down for transportation on the rollagons, Hanley said.
“We used the same rollagon trail as Phillips almost all the way to our site, then split off at the end,” he said.
Altamura is located about six miles south of Moose’s Tooth C, one of the five successful exploration wells drilled last year.
“We’re learning more about the structures of the area, due to Alpine and drilling,” he said.
Seismic work has also given good information about the area, and that data, combined with new interpretative technology, has made NPR-A a good place to search for oil, Hanley said.
Anadarko is spending $100 million this year in Alaska, Hanley said, mostly for exploration oil wells, seismic work in NPR-A and in the Brooks Range foothills, and the company’s share of capital improvements at Alpine.
That’s about 2 percent of Anadarko’s worldwide capital spending budget, he added.
| 