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Another jack-up coming Furie bringing new rig to Cook Inlet for further Kitchen Lights unit drilling ALAN BAILEY Petroleum News
Furie Operating Alaska is bringing another jack-up rig to Cook Inlet to enable the company to continue to pursue its exploration and development drilling campaign in the offshore Kitchen Lights unit, Bruce Webb, Furie senior vice president, told Petroleum News Dec. 4.
Furie will use the rig, Shelf Drilling’s Randolf Yost rig, for its upcoming drilling projects, instead of the Spartan 151 jack-up rig that has been used for previous Kitchen Lights drilling. The Randolf Yost is currently in dry dock in Singapore being modified for Alaska use and will be delivered to Cook Inlet in early to mid April, Webb said.
Bigger rig The Randolf Yost rig is bigger and more powerful than the Spartan 151 and will be more easily cantilevered over the Julius R offshore platform for development drilling in Furie’s Kitchen Lights gas field, Webb explained. The new rig’s greater deck space extent will reduce operating costs by accommodating larger quantities of materials and supplies, reducing the shuffling of supplies to and from the rig. And the rig’s longer legs will enable operation in deeper water than the Spartan rig could handle. Moreover, with a stronger rated drilling derrick, Furie will be able to drill deeper into the rocks of the Cook Inlet basin he said, adding that Furie wants to drill a well seeking oil in deep rocks of Jurassic age, below the Tertiary strata that host the producing Cook Inlet oil and gas fields.
The Spartan rig has been moved to the port of Seward for the winter. BlueCrest Energy, operator of the Cosmopolitan field, under development in the Cook Inlet off the southern coast of the Kenai Peninsula, has said that it may use the Spartan rig for drilling wells to develop gas pools in the field, but the company has yet to make a decision on this development option - the company is developing Cosmopolitan oil using directional drilling from onshore.
Furie’s drilling plans Furie’s drilling plans involve both the drilling of development wells in the Kitchen Lights field and exploration drilling elsewhere in the Kitchen Lights unit.
Gas production from the Kitchen Lights field began on Nov. 22 from a single, initial production well, the Kitchen Lights unit No. 3 well.
As reported in the Nov. 29 issue of Petroleum News, in October Furie filed a plan of development proposing the drilling and completion of a single development well at Kitchen Lights in 2016. In an earlier plan the company had envisaged drilling but not completing two development wells in the field during that year - the idea had been to evaluate by the end of the year the zones penetrated by the wells, Webb said. Based on that evaluation, the company would have conducted appropriate well completions in 2017, he said.
But, with a gas supply contract with Homer Electric Association starting in April 2016, Furie has decided that it needs at least one additional Kitchen Lights production well in operation, as a contingency against some unforeseen problem with the KLU 3 well, Webb said. So, the company now plans to both drill and complete a single development well in 2016, and then to drill and complete another development well in 2017. The end result will be a total of three Kitchen Lights production wells at the end of 2017, as originally conceived, but production from the first of the new development wells will begin earlier than originally proposed, Webb said.
Webb has also told Petroleum News that Furie plans to have four production wells completed by the end of the 2018 drilling season, in readiness for use by the spring of 2019.
As part of its agreement with Homer Electric, Furie has also committed to put 500 million cubic feet of gas into the Cook Inlet Natural Gas Storage Alaska storage facility near Kenai, to act as a backup gas source in the event of an interruption in field production. Furie is in the process of placing gas in storage, to meet that commitment, Webb said.
Exploration drilling Furie now plans to up its exploration efforts in 2016 by re-entering and deepening the Kitchen Lights unit No. 4 well that the company originally completed in 2014, and to drill a further exploration well in 2017, Webb said. Currently the company anticipates that the 2017 well will be the Kitchen Lights unit No. 6 well in the Kitchen Lights southwest block. However, a final determination of the well location will involve an assessment of data from a 3-D seismic survey that Furie carried out this year, Webb said.
The seismic survey, which was conducted by SAExploration, included the entire Kitchen Lights unit, and encompassed a total surface area of more than 155,500 acres, an area almost double that of the unit itself, Webb said.
Data from the seismic survey is currently being processed, Webb said. Initial processing, which should be completed by the middle or end of January, is focusing on the identification of a target for the development well that Furie will drill in 2016. In February the seismic data processing for the rest of the unit will begin, for the identification of exploration targets, Webb said.
An amended oil spill contingency plan which Furie has submitted to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation identifies 10 potential exploration well locations, he said.
Production ramping up Since the start of Kitchen Lights gas production in November, Furie has been gradually ramping up the production rate, which started at about 2 million cubic feet per day and is now running at about 9 million cubic feet per day, Webb said. The company anticipates maximum production from the well to be some 22 million to 25 million cubic feet per day, although the plan is to produce at about 18 million cubic feet per day, he said. So, with Homer Electric contracting for a supply of around 12.4 million cubic feet per day, Furie has about 5 million cubic feet of extra capacity available - the company has some interruptible gas supply contracts in place and is currently negotiating two gas supply contracts that would start between 2017 and 2019. Those later contracts would account for about 12 billion cubic feet of gas per year, Webb said.
Each of the two additional Kitchen Lights development wells that Furie plans to drill should be capable of producing some 35 million cubic feet per day of gas, thus giving the three Kitchen Lights production wells anticipated to be in operation after the 2017 drilling season a combined potential production rate of about 88 million cubic feet per day, Webb said.
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