{"id":42,"date":"2026-05-15T04:08:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T04:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alaskamovingnetwork.com\/?p=42"},"modified":"2026-05-15T04:08:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T04:08:00","slug":"first-oil-from-pikka-imminent-as-developer-hails-biggest-north-slope-project-in-decades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alaskamovingnetwork.com\/?p=42","title":{"rendered":"First oil from Pikka ‘imminent,’ as developer hails biggest North Slope project in decades"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

When the Pikka oil and gas field was discovered in 2013, industry leaders hailed it as the beginning of a renaissance on the North Slope that would extend the life of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Now, more than a decade later, the first sellable oil is expected to come from that field soon.<\/p>\n

Read more NOAA rejects petition to list Gulf of Alaska king salmon under the Endangered Species Act<\/a><\/p>\n

In anticipation, Santos, the company that operates the field, hosted a tour of the facility this week for journalists. Alaska Public Media\u2019s Wesley Early was one of them and discussed it with Alaska News Nightly Host Casey Grove.<\/p>\n

Casey Grove: <\/b>First, Wesley, where is Pikka anyway?<\/p>\n

Wesley Early. <\/b>Pikka is on the North Slope in the National Petroleum Reserve- Alaska, or NPR-A. It\u2019s about a two-hour drive northwest from Deadhorse. That\u2019s the logistics hub, oilfield camp town there on the slope.<\/p>\n

We took a small bus on a long winding road to Pikka, where long metal pipelines flank both sides of the road. It was pretty windy, and snow blew onto the road as we drove. Several flocks of birds like geese and ducks were also on the side. Officials told us they typically come up for spring, and they were early this year. There were a couple arctic foxes and some caribou off the road as well.<\/p>\n

CG: <\/b>OK, here\u2019s the big question: when are we gonna see oil from Pikka?<\/p>\n

WE: <\/b>Well, oil is coming out of Pikka already through test drills, but that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s ready to be sold. They\u2019re still working on testing and installing the last bit of equipment at the Pikka facility. Trevor Palaniuk is the operations and maintenance manager for the facility. He laid out what the first oil process will look like.<\/p>\n

Trevor Palaniuk: <\/b>Get the oil out of the ground, get it to the facility, finish commissioning the equipment that actually makes it sale-spec crude, and then we can get it to market.\u201d<\/p>\n

WE: <\/b>Santos admits it\u2019s a little behind its initial schedule on that. At the main camp that we stayed overnight, there was actually this countdown clock to the first oil that had\u2026 started counting up.<\/p>\n

But they say it\u2019s coming soon. When I toured around the Pikka facility, the word of the day was “imminent.” How imminent \u2026 that\u2019s still up in the air, but Santos says it should come by the end of the month.<\/p>\n

CG: <\/b>How does the Pikka project play into the wider oil and gas industry in Alaska?<\/p>\n

WE: <\/b>Well, Pikka is part of this westward push across the NPR-A, in an area called the Nanushuk Formation. Most Alaska oil is still produced to the east in Prudhoe Bay. But Pikka is the biggest oil development project on the North Slope in decades.<\/p>\n

As we all know, the state government gets the lion\u2019s share of its revenue from oil taxes, royalties and fees, and Pikka is expected to contribute billions to the state over its lifespan. Here\u2019s Joe Balash, a senior VP for external affairs at Santos.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe expect, in this next year, you know, on a conservative oil price, we’ll be contributing somewhere around $250 million to the treasury, and over the life of the project, it gets closer to $7 billion,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Balash\u2019s name might sound familiar. He\u2019s a former state revenue commissioner and was the Assistant Interior Secretary for Land and Minerals during the first Trump administration. The job with Santos is Balash\u2019s first foray into the private sector, and he says he\u2019s hopeful that the first phase of the Pikka project \u2013 which, again, is supposed to bring in $7 billion over its lifespan \u2013 will lead to more exploration in the NPR-A.<\/p>\n

CG: <\/b>Tell us about Santos, the company that operates the Pikka Project. What\u2019s their deal?<\/p>\n

Read more Alaska prosecutors accuse two Wasilla residents of more than 400 identity theft-related crimes<\/a><\/p>\n

WE: <\/b>So Santos is actually a newer player on the North Slope. They acquired the Pikka area in 2021 after merging with the company Oil Search. Pikka is actually their only operation in North America. They\u2019re an Australian company, and before that their only assets were in Australia and Papua New Guinea.<\/p>\n

A lot of the people I met on the tour have decades of experience with the oil and gas industry, whether it was with BP, or ConocoPhillips or Hilcorp, but a lot of them had only been working with Santos the last few years.<\/p>\n

Santos has invested about $3 billion dollars into the Pikka project, and there are about 45 wells at the drillsite. The operation also includes a processing facility and a seawater treatment plant, both of which were included in the tour.<\/p>\n

CG:<\/b> Did anything stand out to you on the tour?<\/p>\n

WE: <\/b>Right off the bat, the first thing you notice is how new the facilities are. Lots of components had just been built and shipped in from all over the world. Palaniuk, the operations manager, told me a lot of the facilities on the North Slope are decades old, and there are some modern advances in technology that Pikka is able to take advantage of.<\/p>\n

One example is the rig\u2019s control center. Palaniuk says, in the past, the control centers were at the rigs themselves, but Pikka\u2019s is able to operate remotely from the camp.<\/p>\n

Trevor Palaniuk: <\/b>So a lot of the older design of facilities, they call it facility siting, wasn\u2019t really well understood. So you had a lot of control rooms put into hazardous areas. That\u2019s the biggest driver here is we got them out of there. They\u2019re away from the site. So if there\u2019s a major incident back there, these guys are safe.<\/p>\n

WE: <\/b>A lot of the rig\u2019s facilities were active while we were there, which meant we had to have a bunch of safety gear — coveralls, heavy boots, safety glasses, ear plugs. Basically everything a worker has to wear, we were wearing.<\/p>\n

Another interesting part of the tour was the focus on the relationship between Pikka and the local village of Nuiqsit, about nine miles away. The Inupiaq village of about 450 people has long had a complicated relationship with oil development, balancing money the local Kuukpik Native Corporation gets from owning the surface mineral rights on the land with concerns over impacts to subsistence hunting.<\/p>\n

Santos officials say they\u2019ve been working hard to strengthen their relationship with Nuiqsut. Part of the tour was a boat launch that Santos built specifically for Nuiqsut residents to use when they\u2019re hunting. John Kunaknana is Santos\u2019s community liaison with the village and says the boat launch has helped locals a lot.<\/p>\n

John Kunaknana: <\/b>They would have to go all the way to Oliktok, which is a couple hour drive by boat. It shortens the drive by an hour. So it’s well received by the community.\u201d<\/p>\n

WE: <\/b>Other projects include a local bridge project and upgrades to the village\u2019s wastewater treatment plant.<\/p>\n

CG: <\/b>Wesley, it really sounds like they rolled out the red carpet for you.<\/p>\n

WE: <\/b>I have to admit, it was fun and interesting to spend some time on the North Slope. It\u2019s not a place we, as journalists, get to see very often. But I want to point out that, while Santos invited us on this trip and facilitated it and, of course, guided the tour, we did pay our own way to get there.<\/p>\n

And we aren\u2019t the only guests Santos is showing the Pikka project to.<\/p>\n

A lot of the movement in Pikka comes amid this national push from the Trump administration to, as they put it, \u201cunleash Alaska\u2019s resource potential.\u201d Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is set to tour the facility on Friday, ahead of attending the governor\u2019s sustainable energy conference next week. That will come after a tour of ConocoPhillips\u2019 Willow project, another major oil development that officials hope will bring a lot of revenue to the state.<\/p>\n

Read more In Anchorage, an \u2018average\u2019 wildfire season still comes with risk<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More than a decade after the Pikka field ushered in what industry leaders called a renaissance on Alaska’s North Slope, the first sellable oil is expected to come from that field soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFirst oil from Pikka 'imminent,' as developer hails biggest North Slope project in decades - Alaska Moving Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/alaskamovingnetwork.com\/?p=42\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"First oil from Pikka 'imminent,' as developer hails biggest North Slope project in decades - 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