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Great Bear files for year-round camp
Kay Cashman Petroleum News
The Alaska Department of Natural Resources’ Northern Region Land Office is considering issuing a land use permit to a Great Bear Petroleum contractor for part of the Franklin Bluffs gravel pad, where Black Gold Oilfield Services wants to place a 100-man camp in support of the independent oil company’s year-round “petroleum exploration activities” from October of this year to September 2016.
The agency posted a public notice online on Sept. 14; comments must be in by 5 p.m., Sept. 20.
The DNR-managed Franklin Bluffs pad is on the east side of the Dalton Highway, about 40 miles south of Deadhorse, at approximately N69° 43.34’ W148° 41.04’.
Black Gold is asking to use about two acres on the eastern side of the pad.
Structures would include “camp buildings, fuel tanks, and various vehicles and other storage units,” DNR said in the notice.
Potable water would be hauled from Deadhorse and stored in tanks. Wastewater would be treated by a “Lifewater Engineering system and effluent would meet all NPDES standards and be pumped to the tundra. Solid waste would be stored and hauled to Deadhorse for proper disposal,” the agency said.
Independent Great Bear, which holds 500,000 acres of central North Slope acreage that contains three world-class source rocks, hopes to drill two or three vertical wells between October and the end of the year. In the spring, after the off-road winter season drilling has ceased elsewhere on the North Slope and a rig is again available, the company plans to drill at least one horizontal production sidetrack from each vertical well bore.
Great Bear has said drilling would be on “existing gravel features (roads, pads and material sites)” along the Dalton Highway “about 20 to 35 miles south of Prudhoe Bay.”
Anadarko using southwest part of pad In July, Anadarko Petroleum requested and recently received a land use permit for “approximately 475 square feet” on 10.9 acres on the southwest portion of the Franklin Bluffs pad.
DNR said Anadarko would be using the gravel pad for a camp and staging area, starting as soon as October, to support and stage 2011-12 winter exploration activities at the company’s existing Chandler Well No. 1 in the Brooks Range Foothills of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
As first reported in the July 10 issue of Petroleum News, Anadarko plans a rig-less test of the gas exploration well, which it finished drilling in 2009.
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