Alaska oilfields drive industry changes: search for solutions fuels engines of innovation.

• Author: Bradner, Mike
• Position: OIL & GAS

Over the years Alaska's oilfields have been engines of innovation in the industry as companies moved to solve problems of high costs, remote locations and some technological challenges unique to Alaska. Over several decades there have been breakthroughs in several areas, most notably in drilling, that were developed in Alaska and are now being "exported" to other parts of the world.

It must be recognized, however, that from the beginning of Alaska's modern petroleum industry, companies have met challenges they faced with unique engineering innovations. The building of the Cook Inlet production platforms in Southcentral Alaska were considered breakthrough technologies in the 1960s and early 1970s. The siting of platforms sturdy enough to withstand the heavy forces of moving ice and tides in upper Cook Inlet were substantial accomplishments.

Likewise, construction of the Trans Alaska Pipeline System in the mid-1970s required the development of engineering solutions to unique problems, mainly permafrost. Some of the innovations developed for TAPS were invented at the time--they had not been done before.

In recent years the list of "made in Alaska" innovations would include, most notably, "horizontal" production wells drilled laterally through sandstone reservoirs; "coiled-tubing" wells drilled with a drill motor attached to coiled, flexible tubing (as compared to traditional wells drilled by "rotary" drill rigs); and "multi-lateral" wells, where several producing wells, or legs, are drilled off underground from a single well drilled from the surface. With multi-lateral wells the producing companies are now drilling as many as six underground producing legs from a single well to surface, an innovation that has reduced costs and allowed the production of small oil layers that would otherwise not be economic.

IMPROVING PRODUCTION

There are also improvements to production technologies, some first done in Alaska and some borrowed from elsewhere but adapted to Alaska. Examples of these innovations are in the production of thick, viscous oil found on the North Slope. Viscous oil is the thick, lower-quality oil found adjacent and at shallower depths overlying the conventional "light" oil fields on the Slope. The West Sak viscous oil deposits in the Kuparuk River field is the best known of these. In the BP-owned Milne Point field nearby, they are called the "Shrader Bluff" deposits, essentially the same oil as in West Sak.

Viscous oil development is an example of the Alaska producing companies engaging patiently in a long process of...