Nicolai Creek POD OK'd with conditions

Division of Oil and Gas requires work by 2025, either plans for a workover at NCU 3, or completion of a workover or redrill of NCU 10

Kristen Nelson

Petroleum News

The Alaska Department of Natural Resources' Division of Oil and Gas has approved Amaroq Resources' plan of development for the Nicolai Creek unit on the west side of Cook Inlet, the unit's 50th POD, but with conditions.

Amaroq's POD, submitted on Sept. 29 by G. Scott Pfoff, the company's president, said development and remedial well work and 3D seismic were planned

At the Nicolai Creek unit 1B injection well, Pfoff said the company has prepared a work program to determine cause and possible remedies of increased pressures encountered during injection operations. "Its implementation requires a wireline unit and Amaroq is pursuing options for the funding of this work," he said.

At the NCU 10 well, he said the company has a tentative work plan and an authorization for expenditure has been prepared for a rig workover. But the company is also evaluating a grassroots well which could produce most of the remaining reserves at the NCU 10 and the NCU 3, a well which would require third party funding and would be done in lieu of workovers at the NCU 10 and NCU 3

Amaroq has also licensed additional 3D data, Pfoff said, covering offshore acreage at Nicolai Creek, and has developed a work scope for analysis of that data, with priority to be given to identifying gas-bearing formations.

The approval with conditions, signed by division Director Derek Nottingham, requires work to be completed by the end of 2025.

Amaroq must commit to completing its plans for workover of the NCU 3 well to restore production by the end of 2025; or: since the company has identified 1 billion cubic feet of "proven undeveloped gas reserves" in the NCU 10, "Amaroq will commit to conducting a workover or redrilling" of NCU 10 before the end of 2025.

The division said Amaroq plans to install a booster compressor at the south production facility in the first half of 2024, which will allow additional gas production from NCU 2 and NCU 11, while maintaining NCU 9 production.

Nicolai Creek is one of Cook Inlet's smaller gas producers, averaging 0.08% of inlet production in October, the most recent month for which Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission data are available.

Production began in 1968, the division said, and the field was shut-in from 1977 until 2001 when Aurora Gas took over as operator and 100% working interest owner from Union Oil Company of California. Amaroq -- then called Aurora Exploration -- became operator and 100% working interest owner effective Jan. 1, 2018, after Aurora gas filed for bankruptcy.