Doyon drills frontier basins: NANA and Ahtna evaluating prospects.

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

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Big oil and gas discoveries have been made in northern and southern Alaska, both on the North Slope and in Cook Inlet. What about the eight hundred miles in between? There are big sedimentary basins in the Interior that have had very little exploration. Are there possibilities?

Alaska Native corporations who own land in these areas certainly think so. Doyon Limited, the Alaska Native regional corporation based in Fairbanks, owns 12.5 million acres of surface and subsurface lands in Interior Alaska, including lands in the big Yukon Flats basin and in part of the Nenana basin.

Doyon is now pushing ahead with an active oil and gas exploration drilling program in the Nenana Basin, although this is focused on about 400,000 acres of state lands Doyon has under lease. The corporation is also doing preliminary exploration in the Yukon Flats region on lands it owns with village corporations.

Doyon Not Alone

Doyon isn't alone. In northwest Alaska NANA Regional Corp. is evaluating prospects in the Kotzebue Basin, where NANA owns lands. In the Copper Valley region near Glennallen, Ahtna, Inc., the Alaska Native regional corporation for that area, owns lands with oil and gas potential and has worked with private companies on exploration drilling.

Doyon is the most active, however. The corporation will be drilling its second test well in the Nenana Basin in July. The basin is west of Fairbanks covering an area south of the city of Nenana to the Minto Flats region in the north. These are state-owned lands on which Doyon and several partners secured rights several years ago under a state Exploration License, which Doyon has now converted to conventional state oil and gas leases.

The immediate focus is on a prospect area about ten miles west of Nenana, the site of Doyon's planned Nunivak No. 2 well that will "spud" in July. An earlier well, Nunivak No. 1, was drilled a few miles to the east in 2009. It did not find commercial oil or gas, but the results were encouraging enough for Doyon to continue the effort.

A gravel road to the new exploration site was completed this past winter and a drill rig will be moved to the site in June. The first few miles of road were built in 2009 to reach the first well site and then extended about seven more miles to the new drill location.

The road itself is strategic new infrastructure for the area. Doyon is paying for it, although state exploration incentives will have the state pick up a big part...