Savant Alaska LLC: expanding operations at Badami Field unit.

• Author: Orr, Vanessa
• Position: Special section: OIL & GAS

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. That seems to be the case at the Badami Field on the North Slope, where for years, BP tried to recover what was originally estimated as 120 million barrels of oil from the difficult site. In 2010, however, a relatively new company to Alaska--Savant Alaska LLC--found a way to recover some of these fallow resources, and it is now using this same technology to continue in its quest to conquer the Badami sands.

With working interest partner ASRC Exploration LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Arctic Slope Regional Corp., Savant is making inroads into what was once considered an extremely challenging site. Discovered by Conoco in 1990, the first well in the Badami pool had an initial drill stem test in excess of 4,000 barrels a day. BP acquired the field in 1994 and began production in 1998, only to find that it couldn't meet its estimated production numbers. The company shut the field down in 2003, reopened it from 2005 to 2007, and then halted production again until entering into a farm-out arrangement with Savant Alaska and ASRC Exploration in the summer of 2008.

FARM-OUT AGREEMENT

The farm-out agreement obligated Savant and ASRC to apply new technology to the Badami sands pool and to explore for new oil in the Badami Unit. "Savant and ASRC were the first to drill a high angle or horizontal sidetrack well in the field, which we completed in 2010," said Gregory R. Vigil, president of Savant Alaska LLC. "It was the first application of this technology in the Badami Unit, and it enabled us to connect more of the producing reservoirs in the Badami sands formation." One of the difficulties at the Badami site is that the oil and gas available is found in a series of turbidite channels, which need to be better connected in order to allow more oil to be recovered.

Utilizing one of the vertical wells drilled previously by BP, Savant and its partner were able to drill a horizontal sidetrack well to better connect discontinuous sands. Since beginning production in late 2010, the company is now producing approximately 1,200 barrels of oil per day. The next step in the evolution of the redevelopment of the Badami sands pool is to hydraulically fracture stimulate a horizontal well to further increase recovery, which the company is hoping to implement in 2013.

The Middle Ellesmerian Kekiktuk formation, where Savant drilled its B1-38 Red Wolf exploration well, is a deeper and older geologic formation than the...