Savant Alaska, ASRC and BP Restart Badami Plant: two wells completed, flow testing begins.

AuthorResz, Heather A.
PositionOIL & GAS

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Savant Alaska LLC and its local partner, Arctic Slope Regional Corp., may have cracked the code that has kept an estimated 120 million barrels of oil (MMBO)locked in Badami's sands. Locked so tight, the Arctic Energy Office revised its original estimate down to 60 MMBO.

But based on the success of an exploration well, B1-38, and a sidetrack well, B1-18A, Greg Vigil, executive vice president of Savant Alaska, said the company is optimistic.

A subsidiary of independent Denver-based Savant Resources, Savant Alaska, ASRC and BP have been working together to restart the Badami plant to resume some production and conduct flow testing.

"We're well on the way to beginning production in September," Vigil said.

The three companies announced a cooperative agreement in July 2008 to drill additional wells to bring Badami back to production, and possibly expand the field. The plan, they announced then, included several wells, including the two wells drilled to date. Savant has a 90 percent working interest in the wells and ASRC Exploration owns the other 10 percent.

Vigil said the venture's first exploratory well--B1-38, or Red Wolf--found enough oil to be completed for production. And the B1-18 sidetrack well looks very promising based on initial flow-backs, he said.

By drilling through the sands horizontally, Vigil said, each well could connect more of Badami's discontinuous sands.

"We wanted to apply different technology to Badami's sands," he said. "We were the first ones to try drilling in a horizontal manner."

TURBIDITE RESERVOIR PROVES PROBLEMATIC

When Conoco discovered the Badami pool on Mikkelsen Bay east of Prudhoe in 1990, it had an initial drill stem test in excess of 4,000 barrels of oil per day.

But producing the North Slope's first turbidite reservoir has proven problematic for BP. The formation is a series of channels, like fingers, and the puzzle has been how to get the oil and gas to travel from channel to channel.

BP acquired the field in 1994 and began production in August 1998. Back then, it anticipated production of 35,000 barrels a day from as many as 30 wells, but by that October, production from seven was only 4,000 to 5,000 bpd. By the time BP put the field into warm shutdown in 2003, it was producing just 1,350 bpd. In 2005, BP tried again to produce the field seasonally. It produced 851,355 barrels from 2005 to 2007 before production was halted for a second time.

Vigil said he is optimistic horizontal...

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