is "wrapping up" its first major winter construction season at its Willow project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska "this week," company Chairman and CEO Ryan Lance said May 2 in prepared remarks for a first quarter earnings conference call.
(See chart in the online issue PDF)
In the Q&A session the first question came from Devin McDermott, a vice president at Morgan Stanley Research Division. He asked for more details on Willow work.
"We had a really strong start to project execution here at Willow this year ... we were able to successfully mobilize over 1,200 workers and were able to successfully build out 7 miles of gravel road, and 30 acres of gravel pads for future facilities," replied Kirk Johnson, senior vice president of Global Operations for ConocoPhillips.
In a March 22 presentation to the Alaska Support Industry Alliance, Connor Dunn, vice president, Willow, said the plan was to lay out 60 acres of gravel pad during the winter construction season.
"And we constructed all the pipelines that we planned for this winter season," Johnson said; Dunn had said that would be 8 miles of pipelines.
Module fabrication
"In addition, offsite module fabrication has continued to progress really well this winter and this spring and we are expecting to be ready to transport the first of those modules to the North Slope ... on schedule in mid-year, which is for the Willow Operations Center," Johnson said.
On March22, Dunn had said there were 12 modules "currently under fabrication for the Willow Operations Center, representing some 3,000 tons of equipment ahead of building the project's central facility."
Confidence in estimates
Johnson said May 2 that ConocoPhillips still expects "to be in the range of $1.5 billion for 2024" at Willow, adding that the progress the company is making this year "gives us confidence to keep our estimate of our total capital to first production remaining unchanged. So we're still in that $7 billion to $7.5 billion range. And again, that's underpinned not just by the progress that we're making here on construction here this year, both on the North Slope and our offsite module fabrication, but we continue to make some really strong progress on our contractual scope," landing "three-quarters of our total project scope here to date, and we have an expectation that we could be upwards of 90% of our total scope contracted here by year-end."
And so "as we look forward here for the remainder of the year, obviously, we're going to continue off-site module fabrication for production facilities, and then we'll continue to ramp up both procurement and certainly prepare for the follow-on winter construction season," Johnson said.
"So great progress on the Willow project this year, putting us in a really strong position. We do these projects a lot in Alaska, and it's great to see the team's making the progress they are here yet again this year." Johnson finished.
ConocoPhillips Willow project on the North Slope in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska is estimated to produce 180,000 barrels of oil per day at its peak, with startup expected in 2029.
