New North Slope infrastructure: critical to oil and gas industry development.

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

From east to west across the North Slope, critical oil and gas industry infrastructure is being put into place that could usher in a new era of incremental petroleum development. New infrastructure is also planned for the southern slope, which will open up prospective new areas for development and exploration.

At Point Thomson, sixty miles east of Prudhoe Bay, a twenty-mile common carrier liquids pipeline is being built to connect that new project, now being built by Exxon Mobil Corporation and its partners, to the existing twenty-five-mile Badami pipeline, which is now owned by Savant Alaska, an independent company. The Point Thomson pipeline is being built to accommodate growth in the eastern slope region. It will have a capacity of seventy thousand barrels per day, far more than is needed for the ten thousand barrels per day of liquid condensates that will be produced in the initial phase of Point Thomson development. The Badami pipeline already has ample spare capacity.

Since the Badami and Point Thomson pipelines are both common carrier pipelines, a requirement of Alaska law for oil pipelines, other companies will be able to use them. Common Carrier pipelines are required to accept all oil offered for shipment. If Shell develops offshore oil in the eastern Beaufort Sea, for example, the oil can be brought ashore to a connection with the common carrier onshore pipelines, a substantial savings for Shell.

Other critical infrastructure facilities now built at Point Thomson will also benefit development in the eastern North Slope. A permanent, year-around airfield and a dock facility is now complete along with a permanent camp and utilities and communications facilities.

Western North Slope

To the west, at the Colville River west of the large North Slope producing oilfields, ConocoPhillips is building a bridge over a river channel to reach the CD5 drill site on the west side of the river. The bridge and the gravel roads associated with it are strategically important because they will provide access not only to the new drill site but also to projects farther west in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A). In effect, CD5 is providing the "gateway" to the petroleum reserve.

ConocoPhillips is already planning an extension of the road eight miles farther west to the GMT-1 (Greater Moose's Tooth) project it now hopes to develop with its partner, Anadarko Petroleum. The companies are also looking at a possible GMT-2 project, another drill site, a few miles farther west. New exploration drilling planned for this winter will help prove out the GMT-2 prospect.

In this fashion an incremental expansion of the road west into NPR-A could continue toward other areas where discoveries have been made. For example...