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Forest Oil expands Osprey platform, plans to lay pipeline in spring
Redoubt recovery could be more than 100 million barrels if company estimate of 450 million barrels in place and 25 percent recovery rate prove correct
Kristen Nelson PNA Editor-in-Chief
In recent presentations to analysts, Forest Oil Corp. has said it is estimating 450 million barrels of original oil in place at the company’s Redoubt Shoal unit in Cook Inlet: 400 million barrels in the southern and central fault block — penetrated by the first two wells — 40 million barrels in the northern sliver and an additional 10 million barrels at the northern edge of the field.
At a 25 percent recovery rate, Forest said, that would be 113 million barrels of oil.
Gary Carlson, Forest Oil senior vice president, Alaska business unit, has said in the past that 50 million recoverable would be good news at Redoubt.
“That’s the reason we committed when we saw the second well,” Carlson told PNA Oct. 1. “The company was willing to come in with the capital,” he said, “because even though we figured out ways to do things a lot more economical, it’s still expensive to do business in the inlet. And of course if the field’s big enough, you don’t mind spending the money to get it.”
Carlson said 25 percent is “a recovery rate that you would expect with either a secondary recovery or a strong water drive.” At the McArthur River field, he said, recovery is more than 40 percent from their water flood, originally called pressure maintenance.
The typical Cook Inlet Hemlock reservoirs are under saturated, he said — they don’t contain as much gas in a barrel of oil as the oil could hold.
“A saturated oil, when you start lowering the pressure in the reservoir, some gas comes out of solution in the reservoir” and that helps maintain pressure. Without the gas release, he said, you start water flood early to provide pressure support.
“So we’re planning a pressure maintenance project right from the beginning,” he said. That was done with the big Cook Inlet fields in the 1960s, he said. “And so we recognize the need and we’re going to build into our plans the water injectors.”
Third well being evaluated The Redoubt Unit No. 1 well tested at a stabilized flow of 1,010 barrels of oil per day from the Hemlock formation, the company said in February, and Redoubt No. 2 results, announced in June, were a test rate of 1,170 bopd from two intervals in the Hemlock. With artificial lift, combined production from the wells is expected to be 5,500 bopd.
Carlson said the third well is at total depth. He said they would do additional logging and sometime in November the company would have a new map of the field which would better describe the acreage, calculated at some 4,500 acres based on information to date.
Carlson said wells were taking about 75 to 90 days to drill. The fourth will be about a 20,000-foot well which would be spud in October and would probably be completed at the end of the year.
Conam selected for pipelines Carlson said permitting was not complete for development facilities for Redoubt Shoal. “We’re hoping to have all the permits in hand by November,” he said.
“There is some work that we can do without the permits. And we’re doing the engineering. And we have selected the pipeline contractor, we’ve done just about all the engineering we need to do to install the pipelines.”
Conam Construction Co. was the successful bidder on the pipelines, Carlson said. “And we are in the middle of clarifying bids for the facilities.” He said Forest plans to finalize a bid number and contractor for the facilities over the next month.
“Our plans are to install the pipelines after the ice is out of the inlet next spring. And so we’re talking about May, June time frame.
“And we’re hoping to get facilities work done all during the winter. Once we get a contractor selected.” Carlson said he expects facilities modules to be put together on small skids at local shops and be ready to go next spring when the company can get on shore.
“And of course, we’ll be working on the platform all winter, but we’ll be able to hit the ground running.
“But we’re still trying to get on production by the end of 2002,” he said.
Additional deck space on Osprey Because the Osprey was built and installed to be moved if Redoubt Shoal didn’t prove to be commercial, the company held off “doing a significant amount of additional work out there until we proved up the oil field,” Carlson said.
“We designed it to be removed and in order to do that we wanted to keep it as light as possible, recognizing that if we were successful, then we would have to make some modifications. So that was part of that planning clear back in the old Forcenergy days — we were just kind of following through on our plans,” Carlson said.
About 20 percent of additional deck space has been added by expanding the two decks with cantilevers (see photo on cover of Oct. 7 issue of PNA).
The quarters have been in one corner of the platform — sitting over one leg and one set of drilling slots.
“We’re going to move the quarters to where they’re out on a cantilever, like you see on most of the other platforms, and that way the drilling rig can move around from leg to leg without having to move the quarters,” Carlson said.
The other thing Forest has done for platform permanence is to install cathodic protection. That wasn’t done the first year, Carlson, said, “because it’s not that cheap to install these anode beds that you put on the ocean floor and until we were certain we were going to keep the platform at that location, we didn’t install those.
“So we’re busy doing what you’d call normal maintenance on platforms, knowing that the field’s big enough to develop.”
Forest Oil has also extended its one-year drilling contract with Nabors Alaska Drilling Inc. for rig 429 on the platform for two additional years.
The company said when Redoubt Unit No. 2 results were announced that the cost of field development drilling and facilities construction in 2001 and 2002 is estimated at $150-$175 million, with first production planned for the end of 2002.
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