Offshore staff
ALASKA — Companies spent more than $5 million for leases giving them the right to explore for oil on state-owned territory in the Arctic, the Alaska Department of Natural Resources announced last week.
Alaska Beacon summarized the results, reporting that the 2022 areawide North Slope lease sale held once per year by the Division of Oil and Gas was the main attraction, with 63 bids received for 61 tracts and more than $4.5 million offered in high bids for 121,412 acres. A simultaneous state Beaufort Sea sale drew $575,146 in bids for 17,212 offshore acres.
In a statement, the department touted the preliminary results as good for the state economy and the Alaska Permanent Fund, the state-owned oil wealth account.
The average bids per acre—$37.28 for the North Slope and $35.41 for the Beaufort Sea—were among the highest per-acre amounts in the history of the state’s areawide leasing program, the statement said.
The Beaufort Sea is the portion of the Arctic Ocean north and east of Utqiagvik and west of the Canadian islands.
Measured by total dollars offered in high bids, however, it was one of the least lucrative state North Slope lease sales held since the first areawide lease was held in 1999. Only six areawide North Slope sales yielded lower total high bids. Some totals were substantially lower, such as the sale held a year ago, which drew only six bids totaling $467,472 in total high bids.
Lease bidders
Among the active bidders were Oil Search (Alaska) LLC, which picked up tracts near its newly formed Quokka Unit on the western North Slope, and Great Bear Petroleum Ventures, which picked up tracts near its Alkaid and Talitha prospects south of Prudhoe Bay.
The Quokka Unit, approved in June, lies south of the Pikka Unit, a site that Oil Search and its corporate parent Santos Ltd. call “one of the largest conventional oil discoveries made in the United States in the last 30 years.”
Santos in August announced a plan to start Pikka oil production in 2026; the field is expected to produce 80,000 bbl/d, the company said. That compares to total North Slope oil production that has veered between about 450,000 and 500,000 bbl/d over the past year, according to state Department of Revenue figures.
Other active bidders in the lease sale included Hilcorp, the Texas-based independent that in 2020 acquired BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc.’s North Slope assets and took over from bp as the operator of the Prudhoe Bay oil field.
