www.AlaskaAlliance.com 21 WWW.SHEETMETALINC.COM WE’RE MORE THAN JUST ALASKA'S PREMIER METAL FABRICATION FACILITY HVAC • PLUMBING & HEATING • CONTROLS • SERVICE & MAINTENANCE • CERTIFIED AIR BALANCING • UV LIGHTING ONE SOLUTION. ONE COMPANY. AOGA conference that 40 miles of 120 miles of pipeline planned for Pikka are now constructed along with all of the 4,842 vertical support members, or VSMs, needed to support elevated pipelines. Pipelines are built aboveground on the North Slope, supported by the VSMs, to prevent warming of permafrost that underlies the surface. Santos has also drilled 11 production wells for Pikka, or 42 percent of the drilling needed, Gallagher said. Overall infrastructure for Pikka is 44 percent complete, he said. Santos has a high expectation that Pikka’s production wells will perform as expected, Gallagher told the analysts. “Six of the wells have been stimulated and ‘flowed back.’ Postwell modeling results achieved the pre-drill average rate requirements needed to fill the (production) facility in 2026,” he said. The performance of Pikka’s wells will be closely watched because they will be first wells producing from the Nanushuk, a geological formation across much of the western North Slope that is now considered to have major potential for new oil. Companies working on the North Slope have long known about the Nanushuk and that it contains oil, but until recently the belief was that the oil could not be produced economically. Santos believes it can now do that through a combination of new technologies such as horizontal drilling of production wells and pre-production flow tests referenced by Gallagher seem to bear that out. It’s a big bet, however, because Santos and Repsol hold major leaseholders in two adjacent discoveries south of Pikka, Quokka and Horseshoe, which could extend new development across a large area south of Pikka where Santos and Repsol also hold state leases. Pikka, Quokka and Horseshoe are on state lands southeast of the producing Alpine field, which is owned by ConocoPhillips. The large Kuparuk River and Prudhoe Bay fields, the largest on the North Slope, are further east. Being on state lands is considered an advantage because changing federal land policies, which are now more restrictive, could impede future expansions of Willow or development of new discoveries like it within the petroleum reserve. ConocoPhillips and other companies holding leases in the NPR-A are particularly concerned about a set of new land-use rules implemented by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, which administers lands in the petroleum reserve. BLM is part of the U.S. Department of the Interior. The companies’ work at Pikka and Willow have meanwhile set off a mini-boom in oil and gas activity on the North Slope. Oil and gas work had lagged on the slope since an oil price crash in 2015 and 2016 that was followed by low oil prices during the Covid 19 pandemic. However, the industry has still not recovered to its pre-price cash levels of 2014. Employment in the industry is still about half of its 2014 levels, according to Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development data. — Tim Bradner
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