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Furie moving to next Kitchen Lights well Stops drilling of Kitchen Lights Unit No. 1 well at total depth of 15,298 feet; still analyzing this year’s drilling results Alan Bailey Petroleum News
Furie Operating Alaska has reached a total depth 15,298 feet with its Kitchen Lights Unit No. 1 well, drilled from the Spartan 151 jack-up drilling platform in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, and is now planning to move the platform to the drill site for the Kitchen Lights No. 2 well by mid-August, Furie President Damon Kade told Petroleum News in an Aug. 9 email. The company plans to spud Kitchen Lights No. 2 by late August and then drill, evaluate and suspend the well by late October, Kade said.
Started last year Furie started drilling the No. 1 well in 2011, reaching a depth 8,805 feet before halting the drilling for the winter. The company reported a natural gas find with probable reserves of 750 billion cubic feet. The company re-entered the well earlier this summer to complete the drilling.
Damon declined to comment on what Furie has found from this year’s drilling of the well — the company is still analyzing the results of the well logging, he said. However, he confirmed that the well had not drilled into the pre-Tertiary rocks of the basin.
Meantime, with an acute need for new natural gas supplies in Southcentral Alaska, Furie wants to move ahead to develop the gas find that it made in the Kitchen Lights Unit No. 1 well last year. The company plans to install an offshore monopod platform in 2013 — the company has completed the initial platform design, Kade said.
In March Alaska’s Division of Oil and Gas granted Furie an extension of the term of the Kitchen Lights Unit to Jan. 31, 2016 — the unit had originally been due to expire on Jan. 31 of this year.
Pre-Tertiary Kade has previously said that Furie wants to drill both of its Kitchen Lights Unit wells into the pre-Tertiary.
The state has offered a tax credit of up to $25 million to the first company to drill into the pre-Tertiary from a jack-up rig. The term “pre-Tertiary” essentially refers to strata of the Mesozoic era, including rocks of Jurassic age that source the oil in the Cook Inlet oil fields. The Mesozoic strata lie beneath the sequence of Tertiary strata that host the producing Cook Inlet oil and gas fields: For many years there has been speculation about the possibility of finding new oil resources in Mesozoic reservoirs in the basin, although the relatively high cost of deep drilling into the Mesozoic has deterred explorers from doing so.
Under the relevant state statute, the determination of who first drills into the Mesozoic, and hence qualifies for the tax credit, will be made based on when the drilling of the well starts at the seafloor, rather than on when the drill bit penetrates Mesozoic rocks. There are additional, smaller credits available to the second and third companies to drill into the pre-Tertiary using a jack-up rig.
Australian independent Buccaneer Energy Ltd. is in the process of bringing its jack-up rig to Cook Inlet, with plans to drill up to two wells in the inlet this year.
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