Alaska focused 88 Energy has reached two agreements to increase its Project Icewine acreage in the famed “North Slope” oil province by 45,239 net acres.
The ASX listed company’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Accumulate Energy Alaska, has entered into an agreement with Arctic Slope Regional Corporation to lease the hydrocarbon rights across 28,453 acres that are contiguous with the Western Fairway area of the company’s current Project Icewine acreage.
Accumulate has also entered into an agreement with Great Bear Petroleum to acquire a 69.1% working interest in 24,269 acres adjacent to and north of the Central Play Fairway at Project Icewine.
88 Energy paid a total of USD$206,388 for the leases, which take the company’s total acreage position across all three of its main project areas on the Central North Slope to 371,478 net acres.
Managing Director Dave Wall said: “The agreement with ASRC in relation to the western leases is significant as they are partly covered by several prospects that are in our current conventional farm-out package.”
“Additionally, the Central Fairway acquisition has delivered additional acres close to the road and pipeline that are considered prospective for both the HRZ and conventional plays.”
88 Energy is currently working its way towards a farm out at Project Icewine that management estimates could potentially host up 1.75 billion barrels of oil net to 88 Energy in the conventional prospects and possibly up to 2 billion barrels of liquids in the unconventional HRZ Formation.
3D seismic shot over only 25% of the project has already allowed the company to upgrade a number of conventional leads into drillable prospects.
The HRZ unconventional play was de-risked by core and log analysis from the Icewine-1 well and successful stimulation of the Icewine-2 well.
Icewine also benefits from easy access to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, which runs straight through the project and has plenty of spare capacity.
88 Energy is looking to farm-out its conventional portfolio, which contains multiple stacked prospects, before the end of the year and the unconventional play in the first half of 2019.
