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Prudhoe Bay miscible injectant expansion on schedule
Kristen Nelson PNA News Editor
The Prudhoe Bay miscible injectant expansion, the MIX project, is on schedule and on budget, with about half of the $160 million value of the project — the nine-story booster module being built near the port — visible from downtown Anchorage.
When the project is completed later this year, the additional miscible injectant produced will be used for enhanced oil recovery, adding 20,000 barrels of oil a day to Prudhoe Bay production and increasing recoverable reserves by some 50 million barrels.
Greg Sills, MIX project manager for ARCO Alaska Inc., told the Resource Development Council for Alaska Inc. on March 25 that the central gas facility at Prudhoe Bay is already the biggest gas plant in the world.
“And not by just a little bit,” he said. “It’s the biggest by a factor of two,” processing about 8 billion cubic feet of gas a day. Capacity to handle the gas which is produced with crude oil — the limiting factor for Prudhoe Bay production — will be increased by about 7 percent when MIX becomes operational late this year. The increased gas handling capacity will allow field operators to produce oil from a larger number of wells at one time. Miscible injectant production will increase by about 25 percent. MI is injected into the reservoir where it acts like a solvent “and literally sweeps residual oil off the rocks and into the production wells,” he said.
All of the new MI will be used in the Prudhoe Bay reservoir, Sills said. However there are, he said, “a lot of other oil fields besides Prudhoe Bay that at some point could use miscible injectant. There’s a lot of discussion about how best to provide that and … talk at some point of expanding this plant even further…”
Growth in Alaska build capabilities The 2,700-ton compressor module being built in Anchorage is the largest oil field production module ever assembled in Alaska. Twenty years ago, Sills said, “I think folks would agree that Alaska companies didn’t quite have the capability that they do today to do this kind of work.” It was only about 10 years ago, he said, that Alaska companies “started to bid seriously for the construction of the smaller truckable modules. “But,” he said, “after doing that work quite well, and at a competitive price, they started clamoring for a change to do something bigger.”
Sills said it was rewarding for him to see the module taking shape. “Some people have said it’s like kick starting a new industry. Whatever you want to call it,” he said, “ARCO’s proud to be part of it.”
The module started out as a three-dimensional computer design. Now, Sills said, it contains some two miles of piping, a little more than a thousand tons of steel and eight miles of wire and cable. Work on the module is about 90 percent complete, but “we still have a tremendous amount of work left to do at the North Slope.” Some of the North Slope work began last year, but most of it remains to be done. Modifications to existing plant, barging module Extensive modifications are being made to the existing central gas facility at Prudhoe Bay. “There is almost no piece of rotating equipment in that plant that is not being upgraded during this project,” Sills said. Work began last year, with about 4,500 man days completed on the North Slope end of the project. An additional 12,000 man days are scheduled on the North Slope in 1999.
The work in on schedule and according to budget in both locations, Sills said. But, he said, ARCO is particularly pleased with one statistic — there have been zero lost-time incidents, injuries to an employee serious enough to cause the employee to miss a day’s work.
When the module is completed in a couple of months it will be loaded “onto a very elaborate self-propelled trailer system” and taken across the dock and loaded onto a big barge. In mid-July that barge will begin a two-week journey to the North slope.
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