Furie Operating Alaska has re-entered its Kitchen Lights Unit No. 1 well in Cook Inlet and has already drilled to a depth below the point it reached when drilling the well last year.
"We're drilling ahead. We're about 9,700 feet down our well right now," Furie President Damon Kade told Petroleum News on May 30.
In the fall of 2011, Furie reached a depth of 8,805 feet in the well, later reporting a natural gas find with probable reserves of 750 billion cubic feet and with a potential gas production rate of up to 30 million cubic feet per day. Gas shows encountered in the current drilling operation have confirmed that there is gas in rocks penetrated by the well, Kade said.
"We have a lot of gas showings all the way down there," he said, adding that his company will need to process the data it obtains from the well before it can evaluate what it is finding.
Furie had cemented the well all the way up to a depth of 4,800 feet and, so, had to re-drill the well from that depth down. "We had to sidetrack and re-drill from 4,800 feet, which is the casing point," Kade said.
Furie plans to drill the well all the way down to the pre-Tertiary rocks of the basin, to a potential maximum depth of around 16,400 feet, seeking both oil and gas.
The company is using the Spartan 151 jack-up rig that the company brought to Cook Inlet last year. The rig dry-docked over the winter at Port Graham at the southwest end of the Kenai Peninsula.
After completing the current well Furie plans to drill its next well, the Kitchen Lights Unit No. 2, in the same area as the No 1 well.
"We should be done by the end of July with this well and then we'll move to the next well early August," Kade said.
The second well will help delineate last year's gas find as well as testing exploration targets down to the pre-Tertiary.
Furie is also moving ahead with its plan to install a monopod platform in 2013 to develop the gas find at the Kitchen Lights Unit No. 1, Kade said. The company is currently doing design work and determining what permits it needs, he said.
In April Alaska's Division of Oil and Gas granted a four-year extension to the term of Furie's Kitchen Lights unit, with the extension contingent on Furie re-entering the No. 1 well and proceeding to drill four or possibly five further wells.
By ALAN BAILEY
Petroleum News