This winter, a major oil exploration effort is happening in a familiar place: Prudhoe Bay
https://www.alaskapublic.org/2018/12/16/this-winter-a-major-oil-exploration-effort-is-happening-in-a-familiar-place-prudhoe-bay/...Prudhoe Bay is the biggest oil field in North America and it has been in production for over 40 years now — a decade longer than expected. But today, if you could peek inside the machinery at Pump Station 1 that collects everything pumped up from Prudhoe Bay, less than one percent of what’s in there is oil. There’s a little bit of water. The other 97 percent? Natural gas.
“So while we’re still a very big oil field, we’re a huge gas field and a big water field,†said Scott Digert of BP Alaska. Digert is the area reservoir development manager for the east side of Prudhoe Bay.
At least for now, Alaska doesn’t have a second pipeline to get all that gas to market, so most of it is pumped back into Prudhoe Bay to help recover more oil. Digert said there’s still plenty left in Prudhoe Bay, but now, they have to work a lot harder to get it, using increasingly advanced technology.
This winter, BP is getting ready to use some of that technology. The oil company is launching a massive effort to get the clearest picture yet of what the Prudhoe Bay oil field looks like. The idea is that, after all these years, there’s more oil at Prudhoe to drill, but it’s in harder-to-find pockets.
“We have thousands of wells that have gone through this area,†Digert said. “But now we’re down to smaller and smaller oil pools that we’re trying to target.â€
Digert explained that this winter, BP is going to go over 470 square miles with a fine-toothed comb.
“This is an unusually large survey for us,†Digert said.
To do it, BP is using what’s called 3-D seismic technology. BP geophysicist Gino Alexander said simply put, 3-D seismic is the process of using sound waves to figure out what it looks like beneath the ground....
