Australian Adrenaline: Santos stimulates Slope with pending Pikka production.

• Author: Rhode, Scott

Hockey season in Alaska wraps up in early April. The Kenai River Brown Bears, Fairbanks Ice Dogs, and Anchorage Wolverines of the North American Hockey League hang up their skates until September. On the other side of the globe, their semipro counterparts in the Australian Ice Hockey League are just starting their season, including the Adelaide Adrenaline, hometown team in the state capital of South Australia.

Adelaide is also the headquarters Santos, which operates oil and gas fields in Australia's northern neighbor, Papua New Guinea, and beyond. In 2020, it acquired more than $1 billion worth of ConocoPhillips' assets in the region. The following year, it came into possession of an Alaska project, making Santos and ConocoPhillips neighbors on the North Slope.

That project, named Pikka, was not necessarily a production prospect when Santos entered Alaska. "If you asked our CEO or some of our senior leadership team, when the acquisition occurred the intent was likely to sell Alaska [assets] or to exit because it really didn't clearly fit with the company's portfolio," the company's Alaska president, Bruce Dingeman, told the annual conference of the Resource Development Council (RDC) in November. Upon further review, though, his new bosses in Adelaide realized what they had: "What fell into the company's hands was a shovel-ready project."

Dingeman went into further detail in a presentation for Santos investors in November. "Typically, when you take FID [final investment decision] on a major project, the degree of engineering completion might be 30 to 40 percent. We had scopes that were up to 70 percent," he explained. "So we took a very high level of definition into that FID."

A decision to proceed had arrived only a few months earlier: in August 2022 Santos committed $2.6 billion for Phase 1 of Pikka. "The project will add further diversification to our portfolio and reduces geographic concentration risk," Santos Managing Director and CEO Kevin Gallagher said at the time.

Fair Dinkum, Mate

Pikka sits on top of the Nanushuk formation, a geologic layer from the early Cretaceous Period, about 100 millionyears ago. when Dromaeosaurus skulked beneath gingko trees near what is now the Colville River. The river forms the eastern boundary of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, just west of the Pikka leases.

The significance of the Nanushuk formation had been overlooked for decades until 2013, when the Pikka discovery well Qugruk 3 was drilled by...