GAS SHALE EXPLORATION AT THE RED DOG MINE, ALASKA

Traditionally, oil and gas field technology development in Alaska has focused on the high-cost, high-productivity oil and gas fields of the North Slope and Cook Inlet, with little or no attention given to the shallow, lower-cost drilling and testing of economically more marginal unconventional gas reservoirs. Existing drilling and completion technology infrastructure, combined with the typical remoteness and environmental sensitivity of many of Alaska's unconventional gas plays, often renders the cost of exploring for and producing unconventional gas in Alaska prohibitive.

To address these operational challenges and promote the development of Alaska's large unconventional gas resource base, new low-cost methods of obtaining critical reservoir parameters prior to drilling and completing more costly production wells are required. Encouragingly, low-cost coring, logging, and in-situ testing technologies have already been developed by the hard rock mining industry in Alaska and worldwide, where an extensive service industry employs highly portable mining rigs.

For the past seven years, Teck Cominco, in association with the Northwestern Alaska Native Association Corporation (NANA), has been conducting a drilling and testing program at their Red Dog in Alaska to determine the production potential of the extensive carbonaceous shale formations of the region. Initial exploration work utilized small diameter coring rigs for source rock recovery and gas desorption measurement testing as well as wireline geophysical logging and pressure transient testing in these same slimholes. Subsequently, Teck Cominco have started developing a five-well pilot project that incorporates cased, cemented, and hydraulically fractured wells that will be production tested for a period of 6 to 9 months. The results of the pilot phase will then be history matched in order to determine long-term gas and water production rates and commercial feasibility.