|
Conveyor belt of prospects
Oil Search exec: Alaska North Slope ideal place for climate change transition
Kay Cashman Petroleum News
Earlier this month Oil Search Alaska COO Matt Elmer said Alaska offers his company a “conveyor belt of opportunities” from west to east across the North Slope. The third largest leaseholder in the state, Oil Search drilled four new wells in the two and a half years since it became a North Slope operator, increasing its contingent oil reserves from approximately 500 million to 1 billion barrels.
“Pikka’s just the start. We have a number of opportunities to develop after Pikka” from the western to the eastern North Slope, Elmer said in his early December presentation to a virtual meeting of the Resource Development Council in Anchorage.
He also said Alaska’s North Slope is “the ideal place to be developing and managing the climate change transition” for oil and gas companies. “It’s a mature basin. It has existing and underutilized infrastructure” such as a pipeline system across the Slope that connects to the 800-mile trans-Alaska pipeline which transports oil to the port of Valdez.
This is a story he hopes Alaskans will “get out there” and tell naysayers, “especially in the finance world where Arctic developments are getting a bad rap.”
The “good thing” about a new field in northern Alaska is “we take advantage of North Slope best practice and all those that have come before us, so as you look at Pikka it will be the next generation oil field. … The facilities are designed for even lower greenhouse gas emission intensity and a small footprint,” Elmer said. “When you compare Pikka to similar sized fields around the world its (greenhouse gas emissions are) extremely low - it’s going to be in the top quartile.”
“Alaska, as we know, has one of the most robust regulatory environments in the world. We don’t flare for production on the North Slope. There are a lot of things that are done to really drive a lower environmental impact,” he said.
Bill Armstrong agrees Bill Armstrong, the man whose company brought Oil Search to the North Slope, agrees with Elmer’s comments.
“People misunderstand Arctic development; they picture offshore production platforms in an iceberg rich sea with whales swimming about or big drilling rigs in a gorgeous, pristine mountain landscape. North Slope Arctic developments are on a flat, barren landscape with nearby underutilized infrastructure already in place,” Armstrong told Petroleum News in a Dec. 8 email.
Equivalent to 3 moon missions In addition to drilling two exploration wells with three penetrations and making three major discoveries (see part one of this story) this past winter, Elmer talked about Oil Search’s massive gravel lay for Phase 1 of its Pikka development.
“The gravel lay was one of the most significant gravel lays that has been done on the North Slope in the last 20 to 25 years. If you looked at the scope of it, we built 200 miles of ice roads, 111 acres of ice pads. We had 17 camps on the Slope and 1,100 people to execute on both the civil works and the two exploration wells,” he said.
“As part of the civil work we laid almost two and a quarter million cubic yards of gravel. We used two mine sites to do it, so it was greater than 50,000 truckloads, so if you lay that out, we actually did the equivalent of three moon missions.”
“There were a lot of miles driven and I’m very proud to say that the safety record we achieved was just outstanding. So not only did we get the roads down, we got three pads. We also had to install one bridge over the Miluveach River,” Elmer said.
As for North Slope activities this winter, he said Dec. 3 that “most of our activities next year will be in the engineering area Now that we’ve got the civil work done and our pads and our roads are down we are looking to take FEED on the project in the first quarter. We hope to get to a final investment decision by the end of the year.”
“So, most of 2021 will be to support that FID decision,” Elmer said.
Editor’s note: See part 1 of this story in last week’s edition of Petroleum News.
| 