Industry interest in Chukchi Sea grows: the U.S. Minerals Management Service considers setting lease sale date; the service says possibility of elephant oilfields beneath Chukchi; and reappraisal of Shell's old Burger well shows lots of gas.(CHAPTER FOUR--CHUKCHI SEA)

Publication: Oil and Gas Investor

Publication Date: 01-OCT-05

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With huge geologic structures and an abundance of source and reservoir rocks, the strata under Alaska's Chukchi Sea could yield another field of Prudhoe Bay scale, federal geologists say.

The U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) estimates there are about 15 billion bbl of oil and 60 Tcf of gas that can be recovered from the Chukchi, which lies north and northwest of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

According to a July 17 article in Petroleum News, the MMS is looking at scheduling the first oil and gas lease sale for the Chukchi Sea since 1988. The agency is considering establishing a regular Chukchi lease sale schedule thereafter, said Alaska regional director John Goll.

There is no definite date for the first sale because the U.S. Secretary of the Interior has to make a decision on whether to start a sale program in the area, but what has spurred the Alaska office's consideration is increasing interest in the Chukchi from industry, Goll said. (Currently, the MMS's Alaska Web page says May 2007, but that is tentative.)

Goll would not name specific companies, but Shell Oil, which recently acquired 86 leases in the federal waters of the adjacent Beaufort Sea, would likely make the list.

1989 PROGRAM LED BY SHELL

Other than a handful of wells drilled between 1989 and 1991 in an oil exploration program led by Shell, the Chukchi Sea is unexplored.

"They went out there in the '90s and punched five wells ......

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