Pumping Up TAPS: The great unknown: ANS shale
Kay Cashman Petroleum News
Having leased 500,000 acres to the south of the Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk’s oil fields in a 2010 state lease sale, Alaska newcomer Great Bear Petroleum is moving forward with plans to drill four to six wells to test the production of oil direct from the prolific source rocks of the North Slope. This “unconventional” type of oil play, sometimes referred to as shale oil or source reservoired oil, has become an exciting major growth area for the Lower 48 oil industry but is new to Alaska, and as such has created a great deal of excitement, and some skepticism, in the state.
Great Bear President Ed Duncan makes it sound almost too good to be true: These three world-class source rocks, mostly shale, could kick Alaska’s oil production up to 1 million barrels a day in just a few short years, requiring about 200 wells per year, he says.
But skeptics beware. Along with overcoming some major permitting hurdles in early December, Great Bear got a show of confidence when Halliburton, expert at extracting oil and gas from source rock in major resource plays outside Alaska, partnered with Great Bear on some of its North Slope acreage.
In the next year Halliburton, the world’s second largest oilfield service company, will be conducting a parallel “proof of concept” multi-well program on Great Bear’s acreage along the Dalton Highway, while Great Bear is executing a similar program to the south, also along the highway. (Go online to http://bit.ly/rtkXIZ for slides used by Duncan in his latest public presentation.)
Still, there are a lot of unknowns and uncertainties about whether the horizontal drilling and fracking techniques that have proven so successful in the Lower 48 states will work on Alaska’s rocks; and, if they do, will be economical in an Arctic environment.
The U.S. Geological Survey, in the process of conducting an assessment of northern Alaska’s shale oil resources in northern Alaska, anticipates publishing the results in January or February 2012.
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