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Winter work puts Meltwater on schedule to produce this year Accumulation discovered in 2000; pad, road, pipelines, power line construction past peak; drilling to begin before thaw Kristen Nelson PNA Editor-in-Chief
Phillips Alaska Inc. plans to get its newest Kuparuk satellite, Meltwater, online this year, in spite of the challenge posed by the field’s distance from facilities and a bit of a late start this winter.
Ryan Stramp, Phillips Alaska’s Meltwater development coordinator, told PNA March 27 that Meltwater is on schedule to begin production this year.
“The exploration drilling took place here in the first quarter of 2000, just a little over a year ago,” he said. Once Phillips determined that the satellite could be developed like Tarn, 10 miles to the north, it basically became a drill site project, Stramp said, and work began to get the field into production in 2001.
Meltwater includes a pad, 10 miles of road and power line and three pipelines: a 24 inch production line, a 12 inch water injection line and an 8 inch miscible injectant line. The pipelines and the road and the power line will be tied back into Tarn to the north, and from there both satellites are connected back to the Kuparuk infrastructure.
The most distant Kuparuk satellite Meltwater is the most distant of the Kuparuk satellites — only 10 miles from Tarn but 25 miles from production facilities at Kuparuk.
Stramp said the company’s process engineers had to determine if crude oil from the Meltwater pad, “would make it on its own energy, or were we going to have to put some pumps or some sort of processing” at the pad. They decided that with a large diameter pipe at the Meltwater end the natural energy from the reservoir would move the crude oil 25 miles to the processing facility.
In addition to the 24 inch line from Meltwater to Tarn, Phillips also installed 24 inch line partway back from Tarn toward the processing facility, “to help both Tarn and Meltwater make that long flow back,” Stramp said.
Phillips got started at Meltwater in mid-January. It was a little later than planned, Stramp said, because of warm weather and some permit issues that didn’t get resolved until about the middle of January.
“So depending on how you look at it, either the permits didn’t slow us down because of the weather or the weather didn’t slow us down because of the permits — but we weren’t going to be ready to get started until the middle of January anyway.”
Work began with the opening of a new gravel site in the area in mid-January and blasting of gravel for the pad and the road. By the end of March, Stramp said, the road and pad were nearly complete. Two of the three pipelines were on the rack and the power line was nearly complete.
“Assuming that we don’t get an exceptionally short construction season,” he said, Phillips expects to finish necessary work this winter so that Meltwater can start up later this year. Peak was 500 people At the beginning of the project, people were bused out from Kuparuk — some even from Prudhoe — but Stramp said once they got under way they moved a camp out to the Meltwater area and the majority were housed there.
At peak, 500 people were working on the project. By the end of March it was down to about 350, and Stramp said the number working at the site would continue to ramp down to about 50 to 80 people installing facilities on the pad.
From May through July, piping and electrical work will continue at the new pad to make it ready for production.
The Meltwater facility design is very similar to what was built for Tarn, Stramp said. “It doesn’t have a lot of modules associated with it. It has a couple of small ones, but it uses a trunk and lateral design instead of a manifold module.” Instead of central manifold modules, he said, recent satellite development has used a series of headers that run the length of the pad — one for production, one for water injection, one for miscible injectant. Lines run between the wells and the headers. “So we really don’t have a manifold module per se,” Stramp said. “The valves that otherwise would be in the manifold are located basically at the junctions between where each of these laterals ties into the trunk.”
Choke and valves for shutting the wells in are in a small building on the pipe rack and another small module houses electrical controls and computers. Materials for the project arrived in Fairbanks in about 200 railcars and it took 750 truckloads from Fairbanks to move it to the slope. Production this year Depending on how badly the summer thaw affects work, “we hope to get production online sometime in early fourth quarter. We might be able to make late third quarter,” Stramp said.
In the past, gravel pads were allowed to drain for a year before they were used. When Tarn was built, the two pads were used the first year — the company built and operated on the gravel the year it thawed.
“At Tarn we were able to successfully work on the soft gravel and we intend to do that again this year at Meltwater,” Stramp said. “The secret to making that work is you’ve got to get the rig out there before it thaws.” The rig will be moved while gravel is still frozen, and drilling will begin in May.
The new gravel will get soft as it thaws, Stramp said: “It definitely is going to have an impact — it’s just how many days or weeks is it going to shut you down.” Drilling this year and next The rig should stay busy drilling at Meltwater until the end of the year, completing 17 or 18 wells.
“We’ll probably take a break for three or four months to assess what our first batch of wells told us, and then probably we’ll drill the final eight or 10 wells in 2002,” Stramp said.
The reservoir at Meltwater is a little shallower than Kuparuk, about 5,200 feet, and conventional directionally drilled wells are planned.
“We’ve got one central pad and we’re going to develop several square miles of reservoir by directionally drilling out in all directions around the pad.” The producing wells will be fracture stimulated because the reservoir is tight, but once the wells have been fractured, they are expected to produce at a good rate. “Our exploration well that we tested last year produced at 4,000 barrels a day during the short-term test,” Stramp said. Enhanced oil recovery from the beginning The expected oil recovery at Meltwater is 52 million barrels. The oil has an American Petroleum Institute gravity of 36 degrees, “which is a fairly thin, nice oil to produce,” Stramp said. Production is expected to begin no later than the fourth quarter of this year and to peak at 20,000 barrels a day in 2002-2003.
To get the 52 million barrels out of the ground at 20,000 barrels a day, “we’re going to implement an enhanced oil recovery process from the very beginning, similar to what we did at Tarn,” he said.
Alternate slugs of water and miscible gas will be injected, to “maximize recovery and rate out of the reservoir,” Stramp said. Seven injectors and 21 producers are planned; over time some of the producers will be converted to injectors.
The current estimate for cost of the facilities and wells is $185 million. Phillips is the majority owner with 55.96 percent of the project. BP at 39.75 percent and Unocal at 3.96 percent are the other major owners. Keeping it flowing The light oils at Tarn and Meltwater tend to deposit paraffin, “so we have to go out periodically with a wire line unit and run tools in the well that scrape that paraffin off the inside of the tubing. We also go out there frequently with equipment including hot oil trucks and tanker trucks that will basically enable us to heat up diesel and flush through the surface lines to melt any paraffin that’s deposited,” Stramp said.
The Meltwater production line is being set up to allow pigging in the 24 inch line between Meltwater and Tarn.
There is also, Stramp said, additional exploration potential between Meltwater and Tarn, “and we made some accommodations for that in our design.” Next winter an exploration well may be drilled in this area, “and if things work out we may have another drill site that we’ll be building in between and tying into this same infrastructure.”
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