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Conoco still evaluating Cosmopolitan well Company completing work at Cook Inlet’s Tyonek platform, considering additional compression, new wells, at Beluga Kristen Nelson Petroleum News Editor-in-Chief
ConocoPhillips Alaska is still evaluating results from its exploration drilling at the Cosmopolitan prospect in the Cook Inlet basin near Anchor Point on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula.
Darren Jones, the company’s vice president for Kuparuk and Cook Inlet, told the Kenai chapter of the Alaska Support Industry Alliance Jan. 20 that results from the well are still confidential, but noted the company has “done extra work on it to evaluate what we’ve seen so far” and is “still studying it, studying what our options are with it.” ConocoPhillips Alaska, a major North Slope operator, has operations in Cook Inlet, legacies of the company’s Atlantic Richfield and Phillips Petroleum predecessors: the Beluga gas field on the west side of Cook Inlet, the Tyonek platform at the North Cook Inlet gas field and the Nikiski liquefied natural gas plant. Workover program winding up at Tyonek The North Cook Inlet field provides ConocoPhillips’ share of the natural gas for the LNG plant. Jones said a workover program at the platform was begun last year, and should be complete in February. It included sidetracking one well and completing two previously unused well bores. The company also ran smaller tubing in a fourth well to allow for better hydraulic following remedial work in that well, Jones said.
“This work will ensure Tyonek deliverability for the LNG plant.”
ConocoPhillips provides 70 percent of the natural gas for the LNG plant from the North Cook Inlet field, the remainder comes from gas fields operated by Marathon Oil, a partner in the plant.
Jones said the current contract for LNG runs out in March 2009, “however it is our desire to extend the contract if the gas reserves in the inlet are sufficient to meet both the local utility and the LNG requirements.” Jones was asked if the company has plans to develop the oil ARCO found off the Tyonek platform in the 1990s.
“We still have that as a long-term opportunity,” he said, although focus at the platform is now on natural gas. The oil found at the platform is “pretty deep … so it’s going to take a good favorable price environment to make it an economic project.”
Additional compression, drilling possible at Beluga At the Beluga River gas field, which supplies natural gas to Southcentral Alaska, demand varies from 90 million cubic feet a day in summer to 180 million cubic feet per day in winter, Jones said. Additional compression options are being evaluated at Beluga, “and possible well additions to maintain the deliverability as the field pressure declines.”
Jones said there’s been a lot of talk recently about declining Cook Inlet gas reserves. While “existing known reserves” in the Cook Inlet basin “will eventually be exhausted by ongoing demand” that doesn’t mean Southcentral Alaska will run out of gas.
“ConocoPhillips believes that the Cook Inlet is entering a period of new exploration and discovery,” Jones said.
“For the first time in 30 years, a producer that finds gas might actually be able to begin selling it soon after the field is hooked up.” He said Cook Inlet is just beginning to come out of its first stage of discoveries, when “easily accessible” reserves are developed. Now, Jones said, higher prices for natural gas have “led to an increase in drilling, followed by new discoveries.”
In the next five to 10 years, he said, exploration work “will tell us a lot about the potential of the basin.”
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