The first natural gas targeted development project on the North Slope is expected to come on line as early as next year. The Point Thomson Field is being developed by Exxon Mobil, 60 miles east of Prudhoe Bay. During a project update for the Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce yesterday, Exxon Mobil Alaska Production Manager Karen Hagedorn described initial development, which will focus on gas condensate. "It's a liquid production that we can actually pump through a pipeline back into the trans-Alaska pipeline and export through the normal infrastructure that we use for oil on the North slope," she said.
Hagedorn highlighted the significance of a recently completed 22 mile pipeline linking Point Thomson to an existing network of North Slope feeder lines.
"So with that pipeline, for the first time, the trans-Alaska pipeline system is now connected all the way from the national petroleum reserve on the west side all the way to the edge of ANWR on the east side of the north slope," she said. "It's all connected up now to the trans-Alaska pipeline, so that's a really important development.”
Hagedorn said three wells at Point Thomson are expected to begin moving condensate in late 2015 or early 2016. She cautioned that the $4 billion project is only half complete; pointing to work that still needs to be done, including installation of football-field-size production modules being built in Korea.
"We are bringing in these modules from Korea. Because of their size, there wasn't an option to build them in Alaska," she said. "But we do have over 130 truckable modules that were built here in Alaska that are also part of the Point Thomson development. And that includes the housing here and also some of the warehouses and utility buildings, those were all built here in Alaska."
Hagedorn said 70 percent of the $2 billion spent so far on Point Thomson has been in Alaska. The Korean made production modules will be delivered next summer.
Dry gas produced from the wells at Point Thomson will be re-injected underground, like it is at Prudhoe Bay, until there’s an Alaska natural gas line, a project Hagedorn described as further along than ever before, given industry and state alignment. She also emphasized the importance of Alaska’s new oil tax regime to encouraging industry investment that creates Alaska jobs.
