Drilling platform back in the development region - Test drilling for infrastructure planning.
While there are signs of spring in Germany, in the Cook Inlet in Alaska it is slowly getting just warm enough for Deutsche Oel & Gas to resume its drilling operations in the Kitchen Lights Unit development region, as planned.
Due to the weather conditions in autumn and winter, drilling activity was interrupted as planned at the end of October 2011, and the drilling platform was transported to the ice-free harbour of Port Graham.
From there, the tugboats Justin Foss, Warrior and Pacific Explorer towed the platform back into the development region of Deutsche Oel & Gas at the end of April, where the 54-man crew of the Spartan 151 finished drilling the first well to the planned depth.
The first wells in the development region were drilled last year starting in August, down to a depth of around 8,800 feet (around 2,680 metres). During these operations, as many as 13 exploitable formations with a natural gas reservoir of up to a billion cubic feet of natural gas were found.
Drilling of the second well in the Kitchen Lights Unit development region is scheduled to begin mid-2012. The necessary infrastructure, such as pipelines and production pipelines, is also to be planned and partly installed this year. As the first pipelines for transporting the natural gas and crude oil produced are to be complete by the end of 2013, a number of test drills were carried out over the past few days in the area surrounding the first drilling site.