Southcentral's promise: with advanced new technologies available and high prices for both oil and natural gas, companies are turning their attention to the Cook Inlet once again and are now quite optimistic.

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

There is a lot of oil and gas left in Cook Inlet. Geologists are convinced of this. But how do we get at it?

Dan Seamount, the geologist commissioner at the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, thinks a lot of oil lies undiscovered in deeply buried rocks in Cook Inlet below the existing producing fields.

These are believed to be the source rocks from which oil seeped up to accumulate in the shallower Cook Inlet fields that have been discovered. They have never been thoroughly tested by explorers, however, for a lot of reasons.

Seamount believes it's mainly because Cook Inlet's development was interrupted by the big discoveries on the North Slope in 1968 and 1969. "It was like the lights got turned off," he said. Basically, industry never went back to exploring the Inlet.

The lights are coming back on, however. With advanced new technologies available and high prices for both oil and natural gas, companies are turning their attention to the Inlet once again and they're now quite optimistic, though there are a lot of uncertainties.

One of the most bullish firms these days is Chevron USA, which purchased Cook Inlet's aging oil production platforms and other assets of Unocal, the previous owner, in 2005.

Chevron now has a $200 million program under way for Cook Inlet, aimed at finding new oil as well as gas. The company aims to refurbish the production platforms, find ways of squeezing more oil out of 30-year-old producing fields, and explore for new oil as well. Chevron thinks oil might be found by deep test wells drilled from the platforms and also in small accumulations at the edges of the large fields that were bypassed earlier.

MORE OPTIMISM

Another company that is optimistic about oil in Cook Inlet is Pioneer Natural Resources Inc., a major independent company that is a partner with ConocoPhillips in Cosmopolitan, an oil discovery near Anchor Point. Early production tests on the discovery were inconclusive as to whether it can be produced, but Pioneer, which has taken over management of the project, plans to drill a new exploration well later this year to run further tests, according to Tadd Owens, Pioneer's Alaska spokesman.

NORTH SLOPE FINDS AFFECT COOK INLET

Seamount said the big North Slope discoveries in the late 1960s came just after Cook Inlet's large fields in the Inlet went into production, drawing industry away at a critical time and interrupting what would have been an orderly, staged development of the Cook Inlet basin...