With work scheduled to begin Dec. 15, Great Bear Pantheon, the Alaska operating arm of Pantheon Resources Ltd., has filed a unit plan of operations application with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Oil and Gas to drill the Talitha B exploration well in the central North Slope’s Talitha unit this winter.
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On Nov. 23, the division posted a public notice on the company’s Oct. 29 unit plan of operations application. The agency is asking for public comments by 4 p.m. Alaska Standard Time on Dec. 23.
The Talitha B well will be drilled as a winter ice road/pad supported operation, with a targeted spud date of Jan. 23.
It will be a vertical well drilled to the base of the Brookian sand, just above the HRZ interval, to approximately 9,800 feet. There are multiple targets in the Brookian interval that will be evaluated, Great Bear said in its application.
The company said the well will be “logged, cased, and will likely be fracture stimulated at the most prospective interval encountered. A decision on stimulation will be made based on seasonal timing and logging results.”
The “log suites are expected to include Quad Combo, FMI, RFT, rotary sidewall cores, NMRI, Caliper, and possibly others,” Great Bear said in its application.
Details from application
The Talitha B ice drill pad will be “approximately 520’ x 240’ (124,800 sq ft, 2.86 acres) as the working surface, larger at the base, and is expected to be approximately 3 feet thick,” per the application.
Support facilities will include a satellite office camp, with an 11-bed capacity, storage areas (e.g., fuel storage, drilling waste or fluid components storage), and maintenance buildings. The crew will be housed at a camp (or the Aurora Hotel) in Deadhorse and shuttled to the well site for their shifts.
Approximately 6 miles of ice road connected to the Dalton Highway at Milepost 386.7 will be required to access the Talitha B site. Although the site is approximately 4 miles west of the Dalton Highway, the ice road route follows a path to maximize access to water sources, Great Bear said in its application.
The ice road will be approximately 35 feet wide and will have a minimum of 0.5 feet of ice cover over the tundra; standard methods will be used to minimize impacts to vegetation, such as filling in small streambeds with extra snow for additional insulation. The routes will be surveyed to ensure that the approved route is followed during construction activities, the company said.
Some minor re-routes may be required depending on site specific conditions at the time of construction.
Great Bear plans to have thermistor strings placed along ice road routes and at proposed ice pad locations that will be used to monitor ground temperatures.
Ice roads will be built using a combination of existing snow along the route, water, and ice chips from approved water sources.
Pantheon enters Alaska in 2019
On Jan. 21, 2019, London-based Pantheon, which was founded in 2005, first entered Alaska with its acquisition of two wholly owned subsidiaries of Great Bear Petroleum Operating - Great Bear Petroleum Ventures I and II.
Pantheon’s operating subsidiary immediately re-entered and tested the Alkaid 1 vertical test well, which Great Bear had drilled in 2015. It was conveniently located just west of the Dalton Highway, south of the Prudhoe Bay unit. Great Bear had been unable to flow test the well because of flooding on the highway.
Pantheon said March 25, 2019, that the first of the three targeted horizons in its re-entry and flow testing of the Alkaid 1 well confirmed an oil discovery.
The company said a 6-foot section “from a 240 foot interval of net pay” in the “Brookian ZOI” was perforated and flow tested at 80-100 barrels of oil per day, yielding light oil.
“Such flow rates are considered to be an excellent result and indicate the potential for materially higher flow rates when wells are drilled in the typical manner for Brookian wells in Alaska - horizontally, stimulated and with larger intervals perforated,” Pantheon said.
Talitha prospect
In July 2020, Pantheon said Great Bear Pantheon would drill an exploration well in its Talitha prospect in the winter of 2020-21 followed by an Alkaid producer, Alkaid 2 sometime in the year that followed.
Talitha 1 was to be a re-drill of the 1986 ARCO Alaska discovery well, Pipeline State No. 1.
Alkaid 2 had the potential to be completed as a producer via the “installation of an Early Production Unit facility,” Pat Galvin, chief commercial officer and general counsel for Great Bear Pantheon, or GBP, told Petroleum News at the time.
In the meantime Pantheon continued to acquire North Slope acreage.
But COVID-19 negatively impacted the availability of rigs, equipment and supplies, not to mention it lowered demand for oil, reducing oil prices.
Billions of barrels
By September 2021 Pantheon was talking billions of barrels of oil in its Alaska acreage with prospects Alkaid, Talitha and Theta West all close to one another along the Dalton High and the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
“We have discovered a lot of oil on the ANS across our Theta West, Talitha and Greater Alkaid projects which are estimated by management to contain over 23 billion barrels of oil in place and over 2.3 billion barrels of recoverable resource in those horizons that have flowed oil,” Bob Rosenthal, technical director for Pantheon, said July 7.
