Doyon preparing for Nenana well

Native regional corporation anticipates start of drilling in mid-July; has completed new seismic survey in Yukon Flats basin

Alan Bailey

Petroleum News

The Nabors Rig 105 is rigging up in preparation for drilling Doyon Ltd.’s Nunivak No. 2 exploration well in the Nenana basin, James Mery, Doyon’s senior vice president, land and natural resources, told Petroleum News in a July 8 email. Doyon anticipates spudding the well by July 13, Mery said.

Doyon, the Native regional corporation for Alaska’s Interior, has been exploring for natural gas in the Nenana basin, about 50 miles southwest of Fairbanks, for several years. And in 2009, in partnership with four other companies, the corporation drilled the Nunivak No. 1 well, about three miles west of the town of Nenana. Although the well did not encounter an economic gas accumulation, Doyon felt sufficiently encouraged by the results of the drilling to want to drill a second well. However, with the corporation’s erstwhile partners dropping out of the program, the No. 2 well, about seven miles west of the first well and targeting a large structural closure in the subsurface, is a 100 percent Doyon project.

Evidence from rock samples from the No. 1 well combined with a re-assessment of seismic, gravity and magnetic data from the basin has suggested the possibility of oil as well as gas in the Nenana basin, Doyon has said.

Mery also said that during the past winter Doyon completed a planned new 3-D seismic survey in the Stevens Village area of the Yukon Flats. The survey location is in a sub-basin of the Yukon Flats basin, a large sediment-filled depression in the Earth’s crust between the trans-Alaska pipeline and the Canadian border. Doyon thinks that there is potential to find both oil and natural gas in the basin and has been actively pursuing exploration possibilities in the basin for a number of years.

The survey, conducted by SAExploration using cable-less recording technology and lasting from late January to early May, covered an area of about 50 square miles, Mery said. Access to the survey area was by helicopter and by an ice road constructed on the Yukon River to Stevens Village from the bridge where the North Slope Haul Road crosses the river. The village corporations for the Yukon Flats communities of Stevens Village and Birch Creek constructed and maintained the ice road, Mery said. CGGVeritas is processing the seismic data, he said.