ifty years ago, a typical oil drilling site on Alaska’s North Slope was spread out over 20 acres and the drilling technology of the day reached about a mile underground surrounding the pad. On the surface, wells were spaced about 120 feet apart.

Today, drill sites have much smaller footprints and drilling innovations such as new bit designs, fluid formulas, and advanced drill rig technologies allow oil companies to reach more than 100 square miles from one pad and drill around geological barriers. Developments such as directional, extended reach, and multilateral drilling allow wells to be drilled in all directions from a single well bore, like spokes on a wheel, leaving most of the surface environment undisturbed.

At the forefront of these advances are the drilling rigs themselves, all of which are specially designed for work in the tough, remote Arctic environment of Alaska’s North Slope, says Ron Wilson, president and general manager of Doyon Drilling. Doyon Drilling is a wholly owned subsidiary of Doyon, Limited, a Fairbanks-based Alaska Native corporation established under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

He says some of the biggest technological changes he’s seen in the past forty years involve downhole technology.

“The tools that allow you to have real-time drilling—so you know where the bit is instead of dropping surveys that take twenty minutes to thirty minutes to get accurate readings,” Wilson says. “Now you know what you’ve got in real time.”

Wilson, who has been with Doyon Drilling since 1982, says the last three rigs the company has built have all been “pretty unique.” They are all AC driven, meaning they use an electric motor driven by an alternating current instead of diesel fuel, which helps reduce emissions and the environmental impact on the fragile tundra.

He was involved in the planning and design of the newest big rig on the North Slope: Doyon 26.

In 2016, ConocoPhillips Alaska and Doyon Drilling partnered to build an extended-reach drilling rig that would allow ConocoPhillips Alaska to reach its Fiord West field, near Alpine in the Colville River Unit, without having to build a new pad. The field isn’t connected to any roads or other infrastructure at Alpine and earlier drill rigs didn’t have the reach to access any hydrocarbons in Fiord West.

Doyon 26 is a major step forward in drilling technology, Doyon Drilling says. Dubbed “The Beast,” the powerful rig has extended reach technology that will allow ConocoPhillips Alaska to reach places that were previously thought to be economically or physically out of reach, not only at Fiord West but other ConocoPhillips leases. It will decrease environmental impact because it can use existing roads and gravel pads. It is the largest mobile land rig in North America and nearly twice as powerful as existing rigs.

According to Wilson, the kelly bushings (a kelly drive in a drill rig, comprised of the kelly and kelly bushing, provides the means to turn the drill bit) in a typical rig are 28 feet to 30 feet. On Doyon 26, they’re 54 feet.

“They’ve really come a long way in horizontal drilling, but this one is capable of at least 40,000 feet,” Wilson says. Its extended-reach technology means it can access underground areas more than 7 miles from its location on the surface, or about 154 square miles of reservoir. Earlier rigs, which were setting drilling records in 2016, could access about 55 square miles.

Built in Canada, the 9.5 million-pound rig was completed in 2019 and shipped to the North Slope in 267 separate tractor-trailer loads. It was reconstructed and moved to its pad in March. It is expected to create about eighty direct jobs and an equal number of indirect jobs, Doyon President and CEO Aaron Schutt said when the plans for the rig were announced in 2016, but shutdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic have kept it from going into action.

Shon Robinson, manager of drilling and wells for ConocoPhillips Alaska, says the company hopes to change how Alaska develops oil and gas resources with Doyon 26.

“We hope to produce from areas that would never have been developed from pads that are already developed,” Robinson says. “The rig will allow us to reduce our footprint in the environment going forward while bringing value to ConocoPhillips and Alaska.”

“Every rig that ConocoPhillips uses has its unique applicability and brings value in its own way,” Robinson says. “All of the rigs currently in our fleet are able to cross the river, meaning we can deploy them in Kuparuk, Alpine, or for exploration. That allows the team to execute opportunities as they are identified.”

Nabors, one of the world’s largest oil and gas drilling contractors, has been conducting commercial drilling operations in Alaska since 1962. Its rig drilled the well that led to the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay (and the well that confirmed the find).

CD5-25 is a dual lateral well. It was drilled to a true vertical depth of 7,900 feet, and a lateral well went another 21,748 feet—about 4 miles—in Alpine A sand, according to ConocoPhillips. A second lateral well added another 12,463 feet in Alpine C sand, for a total of 34,211 feet, a state record for a lateral well. Combined footage for the well added up to 42,993 feet, another Alaska record, according to a news release at the time. The previous North American record, 19,500 feet, was set in 2017 by Eclipse Resources in Ohio.

“Improved technology like extended-reach drilling and multi-lateral wells allow ConocoPhillips to maximize production while minimizing our environmental footprint,” Robinson stated in the news release. “CD5-25 will produce from over 4 miles of reservoir in the long lateral and from over 6 miles of reservoir when both laterals are included. Innovation and teamwork were a huge part of safely drilling this well.”

Rig 19 started work at the Alpine field in 1998 at CD1 through to CD5, according to Doyon Drilling. In its first twenty years at Alpine, Rig 19 successfully drilled nearly 4 million feet. It is a highly mobile rig, consisting of fully integrated, lightweight modules that can drill on a 10-foot wellhead spacing. The 2018 milestone wasn’t the first one for the rig: in 2016, it set a new horizontal injection well record for Alaska at 26,196 feet at the same drill site.

The Doyon 19 rig was later moved nine miles to the Greater Moose’s Tooth 1 site in NPR-A to drill the first well there. First oil production at that site was reached in October 2018.

It was built based on the design of Doyon 141, a repurposed rig Doyon Drilling acquired in the 1990s and retooled, making it the most versatile rig in its fleet. However, it required 25 feet to 30 feet between wells and ConocoPhillips expressed an interest in a rig of the same basic design with the ability to drill on a 10-foot well spacing. The rig also had to be lightweight and able to move across ice bridges.

Doyon 142 began operating for ConocoPhillips in 2016.

“Doyon 142 is one of the most versatile rigs in our fleet and has drilled the longest wells in the Kuparuk field, as well as the penta-lateral producers in the 1H development,” Robinson says.

The penta-lateral wells are five directional wells drilled from a single surface well bore. It allows ConocoPhillips to produce oil at different depths over a total of 39,000 feet

“If you’ve ever looked at West Texas or North Dakota and how they have all these huge oil fields set up with these little processing units, that’s what we have done and patented for the Arctic environment,” O’Malia says. “It’s enclosed so it can withstand the wind and the cold on the North Slope.”

The Mobile Arctic Production System (MAPS) is a production system consisting of 20-foot by 60-foot modules that O’Malia describes as a Lego-like system connected by pipes. A basic configuration would consist of five modules, with various add-ons available depending on the field.

“The way that it works, it is set up to do early production so they can get the results from their well earlier and decide if it’s a viable prospect,” she says. “They can use it as an interim system if they don’t want to build out an entire processing facility.”

It’s a lease-based system that would cost $30 million to $48 million a year, compared with the $300 million investment needed for a standard processing facility, she says.

“It’s a viable solution for Alaska,” O’Malia says. “The goal is to pull out as much oil on the North Slope from what are called puddles. It can make a significant amount of money with oil being as low as $37 a barrel. That’s the advantage to it. Oil doesn’t have around $50 to $70 for a major oil company to decide to go ahead and do work.”

O’Malia says MAPS can be hooked up to existing wells, and the modules can be customized for a client’s needs as far as how much water and gas are in oil, for instance.

“We can take it all the way from what we call fizzy oil—it doesn’t really have anything removed from it—to sales quality,” she says. “It can be trucked to a processing facility or we can tap into an existing pipeline.”

“At this time, we do not intend to resume drilling activity at our North Slope operations for the remainder of 2020,” Lowman says. “This is due to the reduction in our Alaska capital investment program for 2020 by $400 million net, much of which was associated with drilling rigs. I’m not currently able to provide a timeframe for when drilling might resume, but factors to be considered are the price of oil and the status of the proposed tax initiative, which would substantially increase oil taxes.”