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AOGCC approves pool rule changes for 4 Prudhoe Bay satellite fields
Kristen Nelson Petroleum News
The Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has approved requests from Prudhoe Bay unit operator Hilcorp North Slope to amend pool rules for four Prudhoe oil pools.
Hilcorp took over as Prudhoe operator from BP Exploration (Alaska) in mid-2020.
In administrative approvals dated Dec. 20 and Dec. 21, the commission approved amended well spacing for the Aurora, Borealis, Midnight Sun and Polaris oil pools at Prudhoe Bay.
Each of the oil pools previously had specified per-acre spacing for wells in the pools: 40 acres at Aurora and Borealis, 80 acres at Midnight Sun and 20 acres at Polaris.
The commission’s statement in its approval of the Aurora spacing amendment is similar to what it said in the other approvals.
Since the pool rules were approved, “drilling and completion practices have significantly advanced. Strict adherence to a rigid well spacing requirement can prevent smaller targets from being targeted and does not provide for wells to be placed for optimal development of the AOP (Aurora oil pool).”
The commission said rigid well spacing requirements were once common for oil pools in Alaska, “but over the years the spacing has been revised to eliminate the interwell spacing requirements while retaining the standoff restrictions from property lines to allow for optimal development of the pool while protecting the correlative rights of nearby landowners.”
The amended well spacing requirements retain the requirement that “no well shall be opened to production within 500 feet of a property line where ownership and landownership are not the same on both sides of the property line.”
Schrader Bluff In September the commission approved amendment of pool rules for the Schrader Bluff oil pool at Prudhoe to eliminate the 10-acre spacing requirement for that oil pool.
In its Schrader Bluff approval the commission noted that the 10-acre spacing requirement was issued in 2004 and since that time, “horizontal wells and multi-lateral wells have become a much more common development method for the Schrader Bluff formation developments across the North Slope.”
The commission said the old, per-acre requirements “do not work well for horizontal wells since they do not pass through the target formation on vertical or near vertical trajectories but instead travel for thousands of feet horizontally or near horizontally through the target formation.”
Horizontal and multi-lateral wells are not exclusive to the Schrader Bluff formation, the commission said, but have “been used extensively through the state, and as such, the AOGCC has eliminated acre-based and interwell spacing requirements for many pools across the state to allow for more efficient development of the oil and gas resources.”
However, the commission noted, when it has eliminated acre-based or interwell spacing requirements, “it has always imposed property line offset requirements in order to protect correlative rights along property lines where ownership is not the same on both sides of the property line.”
- KRISTEN NELSON
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