North Slope oil operators have a busy winter season planned

Alaska North Slope operators will have a slate of new, mostly small, projects underway in 2023 in addition to two large ones, Pikka and Willow, previously announced.

Pikka and Willow will produce substantial new quantities of oil by 2026 assuming both proceed – over 400,000 barrels per day – but smaller, near-term developments will add new oil in 2023.

Coyote, one undeveloped prospect in the producing Alpine field area, will see further appraisal drilling and initial production in 2023, according to ConocoPhillips.

No estimate of Coyote production was given.

Permitting is underway for a new production pad to support the project.

A second development, Nuna, located a few miles northwest of the Kuparuk field, will see construction of production facilities underway in 2023 with first production expected in early 2025.

Nuna, also a ConocoPhillips project, was first discovered originally by Texas-based independent Pioneer Natural Resources and layer sold to Caelus Energy, also an independent. It was acquired by ConocoPhillips in 2019.

ConocoPhillips has not released reserve or production estimates but Caelus had earlier estimated Nuna recoverable reserves at 100 million barrels and with potential of 20,000 barrels per day to 25,000 barrels per day peak production.

Another new project is Narwhal, south of the Alpine field, where ConocoPhillips, also owner and operator, has drilled three “extended reach” wells from CD 4, a production drillsite in the Alpine field. The company plans for drill 12 additional horizontal wells, also from CD4, to expand production.

A new stand-alone Narwhal drill site, CD8, is in the planning stages to support further drilling to reach parts of the Narwhal reservoir that cannot be efficiently drained with horizontal wells. ConocoPhillips has not released reserve or production estimates for Narwhal.

The company also plans second horizontal production well at Fiord West, a deposit within the Alpine field. An initial well was drilled in 2021 and 2022. Initial production now underway with one well flowing at 11,400 barrels per day.

Fiord West and Narwhal are the latest of a series of smaller oil North Slope accumulations that are being drilled and produced from existing infrastructure. New horizontal drilling technology allows deposits as far as six to seven miles from the surface location of drill rigs to be tapped. The new Fiord West well was drilled to 35,526 feet, a North America record for a land-based horizontal drllling.

Horizontal production wells are drilled routinely across the North Slope but at Fiord West technical problems likely, related to subsurface conditions in the area, caused the first well to take six months to drill.

The company is incorporating “lessons learned” into planning for the second and future wells, Isaacson said. “Despite the delay, the first Fiord West well has exceeded expectations,”: he said.

Fiord West is expected to produce 20,000 barrels per day when fully developed, the company said.

In another project, ConocoPhillips plans an expansion of its West Sak viscous oil project in the Kuparuk River field. Viscous oil, at timed labelled heavy oil, is thicker and cooler than conventional “light” oil and has presented operators with technical problems.

Enough of those were resolved so that ConocoPhillips could begin producing its North East West Sak, or NEWS, in 2017. An expansion of the current 1H drill-site used is now planned with evaluation of a second drill-site pad, now called Eastern NEWS, being evaluated.

State geologists say the in-place West Sak viscous oil resource is large and that expanded production is likely as technology improves. Hilcorp Energy is already expanding production from a similar viscous oil formation, which it calls Schrader Bluff, in the Milne Point field adjacent to the Kuparuk field using a new polymer technology.

As for the two large North Slope projects, Pikka, with estimated reserves of 400 million barrels in its first phase, is now underway after its owners, Australia-based Santos Ltd. and Madrid-based Repsol, approved investment in its first phase.

Surface facilities like gravel roads and pads were built earlier for Pikka. Work in 2023 will focus on drilling of production wells, with fabrication and delivery of large production plant modules in 2024 and 2025, Bruce Dingeman, Santos’ Alaska president, told an Alaska business conference Nov. 17.

On ConocoPhillips’ Willow, construction of roads and other gravel infrastructure is expected to begin in January, according to the company’s Alaska CEO, Erec Erickson.

However, the Final Investment Decision on the full $8 billion Willow project will come after the U.S. Bureau of Land Management issued a revised Final Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision for Willow, Erickson told the support industry conference. Those are expected later this year. Willow’s intial estimated reserves 600 million barrels.