Great Bear petroleum: Indie wants long-term production tests on oil shale wells.

AuthorOrr, Vanessa
PositionOIL & GAS

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While Alaska has long been known for conventional oil and gas development, one relative newcomer to the state, Alaska-based Great Bear Petroleum Operating LLC, is making news in a more unconventional way. The private company, which has been focused on the exploration, development and production of shale-based oil on Alaska's North Slope for the past two years, has asked the state to allow it to amend its plan of operations in the hopes of making a faster decision on the viability of full-scale production.

According to Great Bear President and Chief Executive Officer Ed Duncan, the company's Alcor No. 1 well was drilled to a depth of 10,812 feet. "We encountered all three oil source rocks at the depth that was predicted and at the maturity state that was predicted," he says.

"We would like to run a longer-term production estimate on our wells," he adds. "If we are able to perform long-term production estimates, depending on those results, it could move our decision point forward by up to a year about whether to proceed with a full-scale shale oil development."

Great Bear has secured approximately 500,000 acres along the trans-Alaska pipeline corridor and is working with oil field services company Halliburton as its venture partner.

Too Early

While Duncan says that it is far too early to estimate reserve numbers for the project, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that Alaska's North Slope holds up to 2 billion barrels of oil and 80 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in shale; an unconventional resource that has remained untapped until now. Alaska's shale formations rank number two for shale potential in the U.S., behind formations in Montana and North Dakota.

If the state gives Great Bear permission to proceed with long-term production testing, Duncan believes that the company may get enough information to move forward at a much faster rate. "Similar to unconventional plays in the Lower 48, long-term production tests will give us the ability to make higher confidence evaluations as to the estimated recovery per well, what kind of flow rates (daily production rates) we can expect, and how quickly the wells will start and decline. In these types of unconventional plays, the wells start great but decline rapidly, so we need this view before we can make high confidence evaluations about this play's commerciality."

Great Bear's regulatory and permitting groups are working very closely with the state to make amendments to...

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