Willow construction year round; Greater Kuparuk area also active
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Steve Sutherlin Petroleum News
2025 will mark the first year of year-round construction for the Willow project in Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve, Heather Tash, VP Alaska asset development for ConocoPhillips Alaska said in a North Slope update presentation to the Alliance Meet Alaska conference in Anchorage March 21.
For the company, "it represents "a huge opportunity for us to continue to take advantage of the newly established gravel roads and pads," she said, adding that in 2024 ConocoPhillips had some 1,200 individuals on the slope focused on Willow, but in 2025 the company has doubled its workforce on the project.
ConocoPhillips was able to accomplish a number of key milestones in 2024 after "a rough start to the winter season," she said. "We were behind a little bit in what we anticipated to be able to get, how quickly we thought we'd be able to achieve."
With the diligence of its contractors, the company ultimately was able to achieve all its critical milestones to ensure that it remained on schedule for first oil in 2029, Tash said, adding, "We appreciate that there was pipeline work, there was road construction work, there was pad construction work, and we also saw the delivery of 12 of our Willow operations center modules on the North Slope."
Greater Kuparuk still opportune East of Willow lies the Greater Kuparuk area, which is just west of the Prudhoe Bay unit.
"We started the development in the 1980's timeframe and even 40 years later, we're continuing to find and develop resources that we didn't have in our original purview of that acreage development and are excited about the opportunities that are before us right now in the Greater Kuparuk area," Tash said.
The Nuna project production module was built in Anchorage and transported to the 49th drill site in the company's Kuparuk River unit assets, she said.
"It was the first drill site that we have completed in the past decade," she said, adding that the project achieved first oil ahead of schedule in December and came in under budget.
Nuna is slated for 29 total development wells that will tie back into the existing Kuparuk area infrastructure she said.
"While we started drilling in September last year, we still have a number of years of drilling ahead of us as we do complete that number of wells," she said. "We hope to achieve peak oil of about 20,000 barrels a day."
Also in the greater Kuparuk area, south of Nuna in the West Sak and viscous oil project, ConocoPhillips brought online a four well pad expansion project and is seeing encouraging results, Tash said, adding, "This project is going to give us more data on our current fields and it's going to be insightful as we think about the future opportunities that that are awarded to us within the viscous oil area."
The Coyote Reservoir, near the Nuna development, is the focus of the company's next major project.
"We've been drilling a handful of wells leading up to this major project, so you would have seen development last year," she said, adding that a 2025 drilling program is ongoing in support of Coyote, and construction continues to develop infrastructure to tie back into existing infrastructure within the KRU.
Continuing opportunities abound In all, Conoco Phillips has drilled more than 58 exploration wells since 2000, including 28 of those wells in the NPR, Tash said.
At the GMT 2 reservoir in the Greater Mooses Tooth unit. ConocoPhillips achieved first oil in December 2021.
"We've developed 25 total wells from that location or in that reservoir, and from 2024 we average production of about 14,000 barrels of oil a day," Tash said.
"And so there continues to be these opportunities, these satellite developments on the western North Slope," she said. "We continue to deepen our Alaska portfolio through resource maturation and exploration, we have a strong pipeline of resource opportunities across our operated assets which will drive growth in these areas, and we're putting ourselves in a position to continue exploring West of Willow as that's enabled for us."
--STEVE SUTHERLIN
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