Alaska update: Looking southwest of Prudhoe Bay into the Colville River Basin, eyeing 250+ million barrels of the lightest sweetest crude on the North Slope...
Ready at Umiat: Renaissance says field development will depend on sustained oil prices
Alan Bailey, Petroleum News
Week of September 13, 2009
The Umiat oil field, adjacent to the Colville River on the eastern side of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, has remained a tantalizing puzzle since the U.S. Navy discovered oil there in 1946 and subsequently abandoned as prohibitively expensive a scheme to pipe oil from the field to Fairbanks.
And despite being known to contain valuable light oil, the field’s remote location, many miles from the Prudhoe Bay oil infrastructure and the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, has continued to preclude development of what could prove to be a useful addition to the inventory of producing fields in northern Alaska.
Perhaps until now, that is.
Executives from oil independent Renaissance Alaska LLC, owner of two federal Bureau of Land Management leases and one state lease over the Umiat reservoir, told Petroleum News Sept. 4 that Renaissance has evaluated the field and is now waiting to see what happens to oil prices before deciding whether to proceed with development drilling. The company has recently renewed the core southerly BLM lease in the field, with the term of the lease now extending through to 2019.
“Umiat oil is light — about 37 API oil — and it’s sweet, sweeter than anything else up on the Slope. We’re excited in terms of the work we’ve done here in the past couple of years to de-risk the project,” said Jim Watt, Renaissance president and CEO.
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