Bodes well for the future!



ANCHORAGE, Alaska — An oil exploration firm has discovered a deposit of potentially 1.8 billion barrels in Alaska's North Slope region south of Prudhoe Bay, the company said.

Pantheon Resources PLC said it located the deposit along the Dalton Highway and Trans-Alaska Pipeline System corridor, The Alaska Journal of Commerce reported Wednesday.

The London-based company made an updated evaluation of an old exploration well and used information gleaned from recent nearby drilling, officials said.

The prospect, called Talitha, could be the latest in a series of big North Slope oil discoveries over the past five years.

Talitha could ultimately produce about 500 million barrels of oil with peak production nearing 90,000 barrels per day, Pantheon CEO Jay Cheatham said.

That production level would make the prospect comparable to the large Alpine field to the northwest operated by ConocoPhillips Co.

While the economics of large North Slope prospects are routinely challenged by remote locations and a lack of infrastructure, Talitha and Pantheon’s nearby Greater Alkaid project avoid those multibillion-dollar hurdles, Cheatham said.

“We are so advantaged because of our location, being able to be right there along the Dalton Highway,” Cheatham said.

The company estimated the Greater Alkaid prospect, which is believed to hold 76 million barrels of recoverable oil, could produce up to 30,000 barrels per day.

The Alkaid-1 well was drilled in 2015 by Anchorage-based Great Bear Petroleum. Pantheon purchased Great Bear and its 312 square miles (808 square kilometers) of North Slope leases in January 2019.

Results from the Pipeline State-1 exploration well drilled by ARCO Oil & Gas Co. in 1988 also helped form the basis of geologic data that led Pantheon to conclude the company has a very large resource.

Pantheon Technical Director Rob Rosenthal, a founding member of Great Bear, said the well data from Greater Alkaid was combined with the old Pipeline State well test results and data from a modern, three-dimensional seismic survey of the area to give a better picture of what lies beneath.

It’s essentially in the same rocks, in the same stuff, in the same play” as the Alkaid well, Rosenthal said.



https://www.foxbusiness.com/li...a-deposit-discovered

Excellent news.

I bet a few tree huggers just had strokes.

Is there that much waste that they can only pull a third of the total estimated volume?

Yes it is. They better get their permits under the current administration though, and maybe even start some work even if only a little.

quote:

Originally posted by WaterburyBob:
Excellent news.

I bet a few tree huggers just had strokes.

Yeah, I'm sure AOC will be thrilled not to mention OPEC.

Jim

Has there ever been a better deal than what the U.S. got from Russia when buying Alaska.

This is good news. I'd imagine at today's prices though, this lease won't be developed until we're back in the $40/brl plus range.

Drill Here, Drill Now!

quote:

Originally posted by Russ59:
This is good news. I'd imagine at today's prices though, this lease won't be developed until we're back in the $40/brl plus range.

Not happening until Russia or the Saudis blink. Both are pretty entrenched and can theoretically last multiple years at $20 a bbl.

quote:

Originally posted by 1s1k:
Has there ever been a better deal than what the U.S. got from Russia when buying Alaska.

For perspective:


We bought Alaska for the equivalent in 1867 of around $110 million in today's dollars.


There's roughly $13.4 billion in crude oil just in this lone find.

Color me skeptical.

In a year with 7 E&P firms already declaring bankruptcy and lowest crude prices that I can remember since the 90s (didn't look it up), a London firm with zero North Slope experience magically announces an acquisition they made last year is as big as Alpine.

This happens every couple years in Alaska. Somebody that has never produced a drop of oil in Alaska buys as 1970s or 1980s well and makes a big splashy headline. I just check in on one headline I remember from 2014 and they've managed to produce zero barrels in 6 years.

I hope I'm wrong

quote:

being able to be right there along the Dalton Highway,

If they are wrong, there'll be oilmen from Louisiana to New Mexico screaming at the ceiling in jealousy - seriously, how often is there a find right next to a highway?

A more in-depth article from the Anchorage newspaper:

https://www.adn.com/business-e...e-find-company-says/

quote:

Originally posted by Il Cattivo:

quote:

being able to be right there along the Dalton Highway,

If they are wrong, there'll be oilmen from Louisiana to New Mexico screaming at the ceiling in jealousy - seriously, how often is there a find right next to a highway?

A strange as this may sound, they're geographically screwed. Sigmaniac linked a more thorough article from a local Alaska newspaper that includes this map:


The reason is that to produce 90,000 barrels per day it takes massive production equipment (each module will weigh more than 2,500 metric tons and it'll take multiple modules) that cannot be built on-site in Alaska. They have to be built elsewhere and preferably in a shipyard. They get loaded on barges, get pulled across the ocean by tugs, and then self propelled module transports (SPMTs) lift them up and drive them down a road or ice road at about 1 mph . They weigh too much for any bridge on the Dalton Highway so you either build a bridge that can handle it (it's as expensive as it sounds) or more likely it sits on a gravel pad from summer until winter freezes the river all the way to the bottom. Best case scenario (matching map to Google earth), they are 140 miles from West Dock in Prudhoe Bay so they would have to go 1 mph for 140 miles without any road/bridge collapses or catastrophic SPMT hydraulic failures (hydraulics keep the load lifted, steer it, and drive it) in the winter in the Arctic Circle. By the way, the Beaufort Sea portion of the Arctic Ocean is only open for international shipping about 60 days a year (frozen the rest).

I can't tell from the map, but they're getting really close to the Brooks Mountain range and you cannot drive a SPMT in the mountains. If that is the case, they're stuck with the uneconomic option of hundreds of modules that can be driven down the road but then on-site they have a massive interconnect project between the tiny modules. Labor rates on the North Slope are very high, and due to the weather productivity rates are very low.

In other words, they'd be better off if the discovery was right on the Beaufort Sea where they could build a landing where the SPMT could drive it a few hundred feet to it's final resting place on piles.

Or they could just get a rig up there like Conoco did with Doyon 26 from Nisku.

That's a single 4,300 metric tons drilling rig that took 267 truckloads to get to the slope, and unlike production equipment drilling rigs are designed to be mobile so they can be moved from one project to the next.

Additonally, a drilling rig has zero production capabilities so they're still stuck with everything I described. In other words, it's not an "or" and Alaska is a story of people punching a hole in the ground with a drilling rig and 40 years later not a drop of oil produced from it. The only production is near the coast for the reasons I described.

quote:

Originally posted by tatortodd:
Color me skeptical.

In a year with 7 E&P firms already declaring bankruptcy and lowest crude prices that I can remember since the 90s (didn't look it up), a London firm with zero North Slope experience magically announces an acquisition they made last year is as big as Alpine.

This happens every couple years in Alaska. Somebody that has never produced a drop of oil in Alaska buys as 1970s or 1980s well and makes a big splashy headline. I just check in on one headline I remember from 2014 and they've managed to produce zero barrels in 6 years.

I hope I'm wrong

That sounds like the history of Oak Island haha

quote:

Originally posted by tatortodd:
That's a single 4,300 metric tons drilling rig that took 267 truckloads to get to the slope, and unlike production equipment drilling rigs are designed to be mobile so they can be moved from one project to the next.

Additonally, a drilling rig has zero production capabilities so they're still stuck with everything I described. In other words, it's not an "or" and Alaska is a story of people punching a hole in the ground with a drilling rig and 40 years later not a drop of oil produced from it. The only production is near the coast for the reasons I described.

I agree completely, just citing an extreme example of overland not being an issue, this is the largest rig on the NA continent. Just pointing out drilling access go/no go has never been an issue that wasn't solved. Offshore or onshore. Oil patch world over. Production infrastructure same thing. It's the money.

quote:

"While the economics of large North Slope prospects are routinely challenged by remote locations and a lack of infrastructure, Talitha and Pantheon's nearby Greater Alkaid project avoid those multibillion-dollar hurdles, Cheatham said.

"We are so advantaged because of our location, being able to be right there along the Dalton Highway," Cheatham said."

This play is specifically attractive given the above quote. If the play and accounting prove, producers will find a way to get it to market, good deal for us. If not, cap it.

You’re still confusing a drilling rig (time on site measured in months) and production equipment (time on site measured in decades). In drilling, one rig does it all. In production, you’re going to need 30,000 to 50,000 metric tons of processing modules.

One of my specialties is developing greenfield production units. For example, if you modularize a 4,300 metric ton 267 piece truckable it’s roughly 3,400 metric tons single unit that can be operational as fast as 6 weeks from day it hits beach. If you’re doing 30,000 to 50,000 metric tons of modules 60 tons at a time you’re not going to be competitive with fields doing in 2,500 to 10,000 metric tons at a time. Additionally, the big modules are being fabricated in a location with a lower hourly wage, higher productivity factor, and you’re not housing the fabrication crew in a man camp. Thousands of small modules have to push all of that interconnect work to a high hourly wage, low productivity factor location that is so remote you have to house and feed everyone in a man camp.

When you get away from the big modules your costs (steel, interconnects, etc) sky rocket. Additionally, since oil is fungible it’s competing against places like West Texas where you have 330 sunny days a year and have much lower cost from wellhead to refinery.

Production of 90,000 barrels a day from 500 million barrels comes to about a 15 year supply.

flashguy