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Starfish success
Glacier finds oil starts production from new reservoir horizon at Badami Alan Bailey Petroleum News
Glacier Oil and Gas Corp. has successfully found oil with its Starfish exploration well at Badami on the North Slope, Carl Giesler, Glacier CEO, told Petroleum News in a June 7 email. The well, referred to as the B1-07 well, has gone into production through the processing facilities at the Badami field. Well testing demonstrated production rates above 2,500 barrels of oil per day, Giesler said.
The Starfish well targeted the Killian sand, a reservoir interval immediately above the oil source rock and below the Badami sands that form the reservoir for the Badami field. The well has proven the geologic and commercial viability of this new reservoir, Giesler said. The B1-07 is the first well brought into production in the Badami unit since 2010 and the first to produce from the Killian sand, he said. The well is located to the southwest of the Badami development area.
Giesler commented on the achievement of drilling the new well in parallel with production operations at Badami, with more than 100,000 manhours of work involved and a threefold increase in the number of personnel at the field site.
Fulcrum for development Giesler has previously commented that the Badami field, located to the east of the central North Slope, can act as a fulcrum for future development in the Badami area. The field processing facilities were designed for production rates of up to 38,500 barrels of oil per day, but until the drilling to the Starfish well, production had only been running at about 1,000 bpd. The Badami pipeline can transport oil from the region to the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
And Glacier has seen the Starfish well, if successful, as a route to opening up development in the Badami area.
“If this well works close to what we think it will, it should open five to seven more prospects similar to it,” Giesler told the Alaska Support Industry Alliance in September.
Giesler told the Alliance that he likened his company’s three key plays in Alaska to the three cards in a hand of Texas Hold ’Em. The continuing oil development at the Redoubt unit in Cook Inlet was “face up.” The two “face down” cards were the proposed Sabre exploration well near the West McArthur River unit, also in Cook Inlet, and the Starfish exploration well in the Badami unit. Glacier may drill the Sabre well this summer.
However, the Starfish card now appears to be “face up.”
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