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Alpine on schedule and moving ahead Ice roads in, vertical support members, pipeline under construction; two boreholes have been put under Colville River with horizontal directional drilling Kristen Nelson PNA News Editor
ARCO Alaska Inc. spokesman Ronnie Chappell told PNA March 3 that Alpine field development is on schedule and moving ahead.
The ice roads are all in, Chappell said. The last of the ice roads, the sea route, was completed at the end of February. That route was used to deliver the Doyon 141 rig to the Fiord location where it is drilling an exploratory well, he said.
After the rig was moved to the Fiord drilling location, large portions of an existing North Slope 300-man camp were moved to the Alpine site and will be converted to permanent use. What they needed, Chappell said, was the common areas of the camp, such as the cafeteria.
Next out on the sea ice road was the Doyon 19 rig, formerly Doyon rig 9, which was almost completely refitted to drill the Alpine wells. “A very powerful top drive will allow us to drill extended reach horizontal wells that are key to the development plan,” Chappell said. A five-year 100-well development drilling program will begin at Alpine this spring.
There is no permanent road to Alpine, so for the rest of the season the sea ice road will carry more than 1,000 truckloads of drilling supplies for the field — tubing, drilling muds, cement etc. Gravel, pipelines Tundra ice roads support pipeline construction and gravel haul, which is under way with more than a dozen large trucks working 24 hours a day moving 16,000 tons a day of gravel to location. About 40 percent of the gravel work was done last year, Chappell said, and that work will be completed this season.
Pipeline work has been ongoing since about the beginning of February. More than 2,700 vertical support members need to be installed and some 2,000 were done by the first week of March. There are two welded pipelines for sales oil from Alpine and seawater from Kuparuk to Alpine. Chappell said a large-diameter coiled tubing pipeline might be used to carry diesel. The welded seawater and sales oil lines are a combined total of 70-80 miles of pipeline, he said, and crews are welding at more than a mile a day. “That work is going extremely well and we are ahead of schedule on the pipeline portion of the project,” Chappell said. River crossing, modules The horizontal directional drilling beneath the Colville River has also gone extremely well, he said. “We have succeeded in completing two boreholes across the river and we are now in the process of reaming those boreholes so that they will be large enough diameter to accommodate cased pipelines. We expect to begin pulling pipe in mid-March.”
The first truckable modules shipped out of Anchorage at the beginning of the month. Two more will be leaving the Anchorage fabrication yard, Chappell said, and then several will be going up from Nikiski.
The sealift portion of the project, being built at Nikiski, is also going well. Work is about 65 percent complete, Chappell said, so they’re on schedule to ship out in mid-July.
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