Anchorage Daily News

Anadarko will expand its search for natural gas in the Brooks Range foothills this winter, using two rigs to complete up to three wells on state and federal land in northern Alaska.

Click to enlarge

Story tools

Comments (0)

E-mail a friend

Print

Share on Facebook

Digg this

Seed Newsvine

Send link via AIM

Follow on Twitter

Font size : A | A | A

The company plans to finish drilling the deep Chandler No. 1 well about 12 miles due east of Umiat and then move the rig about 7.5 miles to the northeast to drill the shallower Gubik No. 4 well.

Both wells sit on Arctic Slope Regional Corp. land east of the Colville River.

At the same time Anadarko works on those two wells, the company plans to drill the Wolf Creek No. 4 well in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, about 40 miles west of Umiat on the other side of the Colville.

Anadarko staked three possible Wolf Creek well locations in early September with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

"This is our plan. It's pretty solid. ... We don't see any show stoppers right now," said company spokesman Mark Hanley.

Anadarko started searching for natural gas in the foothills of the Brooks Range last winter, completing and testing the Gubik No. 3 well and drilling halfway to target depth at Chandler No. 1. Both wells targeted gas, but from different formations.

At Gubik No. 3, the company in January "encountered natural gas in two zones."'

PROGRAM DATES BACK TO 1950S

The current Anadarko program in the foothills dates back to the vast exploration efforts of the Navy and the U.S. Geological Survey in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Back then, crews working for the two federal agencies drilled dozens of test wells throughout NPR-A. Those wells included Gubik No. 1, Gubik. No 2 and the first three Wolf Creek wells.

The Navy drilled Wolf Creek No. 1 in the spring of 1951, finding gas at 1,500 feet. The well flowed at a rate of 881,000 cubic feet per day of gas, but the Navy never quantified the resource potential of the prospect.

Some geologists think the extensive gas resources in the foothills are most likely spread over many relatively smaller fields, rather than focused in a few big giants like the oil fields on the North Slope. If that assessment proves correct, Anadarko would need to craft a strategy for tying fields together, or phasing in development, to justify the project.

The Wolf Creek well would expand Anadarko's efforts into NPR-A.

At a federal lease sale in September, the company picked up additional acreage west of Umiat in NPR-A between the Wolf Creek and Gubik leases.

PIPELINE PROJECTS MULTIPLYING

Anadarko's exploration program in the foothills, the first explicit attempt to find natural gas in northern Alaska, comes as several companies and a state agency have crews conducting fieldwork related to possible natural gas pipeline projects.

TransCanada and the BP-Conoco Phillips joint venture Denali both are doing preliminary work before deciding to pursue a multibillion-dollar project for a gas pipeline routed into Canada.

Meanwhile, both Enstar Natural Gas Co. and the Alaska Natural Gas Development Authority are conducting fieldwork related to in-state pipelines or spur line projects.

This confluence of pipeline activity, though still far from actual construction, could create transportation options for Anadarko over the next 10 years.

"We see both of those as potential options for gas, if we find it in commercial quantities," Hanley said about the in-state and overland options.

ADVERTISEMENT