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BOEM proposes Cook Inlet sale
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is proposing to go ahead this year with an oil and gas lease sale on the federal outer continental shelf of the lower Cook Inlet, the agency said Feb. 24. Lease sale 244, scheduled to take place in June, is the last sale of BOEM’s current five-year outer continental shelf lease sale program. The agency proposes offering 224 blocks in the northerly sector of its Cook Inlet Planning Area - the blocks lie in an area between Kalgin Island in the north and Augustine Island in the south.
EIS completed Late last year the agency completed an environmental impact statement for the sale.
“Following a robust environmental analysis, we are moving forward with the lease sale 244 process,” said Walter Cruickshank, BOEM’s acting director, when announcing the lease sale decision. “We look forward to hearing Governor Walker’s comments and recommendations as we continue to balance environmental considerations with careful development.”
BOEM says that it notified Gov. Walker of the proposed sale and that it would mail him a copy of the notice of sale. The governor will then have 60 days to review and comment on the proposal.
Resurgence of interest? Given a recent lack of interest in leasing on the federal outer continental shelf of Cook Inlet, no lease sales have been held in this region since 1997. However, in 2012 BOEM issued a request for interest in the now-proposed sale - the agency has said that the planned lease sale would include most of the areas identified by industry in its response to the request, but that areas of Steller sea lion critical habitat would be excluded.
The area where BOEM is offering leases forms a continuation of the productive Cook Inlet basin to the north, where active oil and gas fields have reservoir sands in a thick succession of Tertiary strata. Those strata extend across the federal lease sale area. Farther south, in the part of the planning area not being offered for lease, the Tertiary thins out - in that region an oil or gas discovery would depend on finding a reservoir horizon in the older Mesozoic strata which, to the north, underlies the Tertiary succession.
The Cook Inlet planning area remains very little explored. In an earlier exploration era, in the 1970s and 1980s, just 13 wells were drilled in the region. Two of these wells found significant but uneconomic oil shows, while one well encountered minor oil shows. Seven of the wells appear to have been drilled within the proposed lease sale area.
Oil sources As in upper Cook Inlet, the likely oil source rock in the lease sale area would presumably lie within the Jurassic Tuxedni group. Another excellent source rock, the Triassic Kamishak formation, is known to exist along the coast of the Alaska Peninsula on the west side of lower Cook Inlet. However, the extent to which this rock extends north and east, at depth in the Cook Inlet basin, remains unknown.
- ALAN BAILEY
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