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Image courtesy of ConocoPhillips.

ConocoPhillips won a drilling permit and a right-of-way grant from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on Thursday for its proposed Greater Mooses Tooth Unit oil and gas development project (GMT1) in onshore Alaska.

The project will mark the first time oil and gas will be produced from federal land in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPR-A).

The NPR-A is located on Alaska’s North Slope and is the largest single block of federally managed land in the United States.

The GMT1 project, proposed by ConocoPhillips Alaska includes construction of an 11.8-acre drilling pad in the northern portion of the 23-million acre NPR-A.

Along with above-ground elevated pipelines and an electric power line, the GMT1 project will provide access to both federal and Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC) oil and gas resources.

Peak monthly production from the project is expected to hit 30,000 gross barrels of oil per day, according to ConocoPhillips.

According to the BLM, market conditions and other factors will determine when the wells will be drilled.
An approved application for permit to drill is valid for two years or until the lease expires, whichever occurs first.
There are currently 212 authorized leases covering more than 1.75 million acres in the reserve.
However, only exploratory drilling has occurred in the reserve to date.
The Greater Mooses Tooth project would also facilitate the first production and transportation of oil to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline from federal lands in the NPR-A, the BLM said.

The decision comes just one week after the Department of Interior cancelled two U.S. Arctic lease auctions and denied Shell and Norway’s Statoil extensions for their current offshore Alaska leases following Shell’s disappointing offshore Alaska campaign.

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