Anchorage Daily News

Alpine, the most westerly North Slope development, got national play on successive days this month as Anadarko Petroleum and Conoco Phillips held annual analyst meetings. Both companies talked about the most recent satellite to produce through the Alpine facilities, Qannik, and about satellites scheduled to be added to the facility in coming years.

Chuck Meloy, Anadarko's senior vice president, worldwide operations, cited Alpine as an example of Anadarko's business model.

"The key to making money and delivering a great business here is building an economy of scale through anchor fields and then leveraging that infrastructure to your advantage to gather up the fields around," Meloy said.

There are a lot of examples of this, he said, but cited Alpine, noting that the company rarely talks about Alaska.

Anadarko is a partner in the Conoco Phillips Alaska-run Alpine field, the anchor field in the Colville River unit next to the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Conoco has a 78 percent working interest in the Colville River unit; Anadarko has a 22 percent interest. Alpine started producing oil in 2000.

The field has been a success, Meloy said. In the last two or three years, and for the next two or three years, the companies have been starting production from smaller oil pools nearby and handling the oil at Alpine, which will keep overall Alpine output from falling, he said, calling this "a business model that adds a lot of value to Anadarko."

Ryan Lance, Conoco's president of exploration and production for Europe, Africa and the Middle East, said the next day at his company's analyst meeting that startups in 2008 included the Qannik satellite at Alpine; startups planned for 2010-13 include Alpine West; and 2014-plus startups include Lookout and Fiord West.

That would bring the total Alpine satellites to six, including:

• Nanuq, south of the main field, started producing in 2006.

• Fiord, north of the main field, also started in 2006.

• Qannik lies west of the main Alpine processing facilities.

Alpine West would be the first development within NPR-A. It lies just west of Alpine.

Last November, Jim Bowles, Conoco's Alaska president, said the company is still working to permit development of Alpine West, a satellite that would let the company bridge some of the gap between Greater Mooses Tooth in NPR-A and existing Alpine processing facilities.

Last year Conoco said it hoped to have production from Mooses Tooth perhaps as early as 2012 or 2013 -- that clearly now has slipped to at least 2014.

INTO THE CHUKCHI

Larry Archibald, Conoco's vice president for exploration, said at this month's analysts' meeting that the Chukchi is "another giant province" and noted that Conoco and Shell spent "much more than the industry" in acquiring acreage there last year for a reason: "We had differential data," including "new seismic that allowed us to see some of these giant structures that were known about" and well control data from wells drilled a couple of decades ago.

Archibald said Conoco is tentatively planning to drill there as early as 2011. He said Shell has targeted drilling in a different Chukchi prospect in 2010-11.

While Conoco is "pretty confident" in its view of the prospect -- i.e., that its acreage is oil- rather than gas-prone -- Archibald acknowledged that there has been very little exploration in the Chukchi, so it is much more of a frontier basin than the Beaufort.

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