ConocoPhillips gets approval for storage tent at Kuparuk Drill Site 3T

A storage tent may look like a minor addition, but at Kuparuk Drill Site 3T it signaled that ConocoPhillips still has active work, active material flow and continuing support needs on the western edge of the field. For North Slope crews, contractors and transport operators, that usually means another slice of winterized work to bid, build and service near Oliktok Point.

The Alaska Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Oil and Gas approved ConocoPhillips Alaska’s request on April 29 to install the tent at the former Nuna pad, about 11 miles southwest of Oliktok Point. The site sits at the far western end of the Kuparuk drill sites near the coast, a location where weatherproof storage and staging space can matter as much as the wellhead itself.

That approval landed after Nuna already moved into production. ConocoPhillips said it approved funding for the project in 2023, began construction that year, started drilling in late 2024 and achieved first oil on December 17, 2024. The company expects Nuna to reach a peak rate of 20,000 barrels of oil per day. It also calls Nuna the 49th drill site developed within the Kuparuk River Unit and the first new drillsite in the Greater Kuparuk Area in nearly a decade.

The project’s scale helps explain why even a storage tent matters. ConocoPhillips said it acquired the Nuna acreage from Caelus in 2019 after Caelus had already built the gravel road and pad for Drill Site 3T. A state North Slope activity map later summarized the 3T project as including 29 development wells, along with on-pad infrastructure and pipelines. That is the kind of build-out that keeps welders, mechanics, heavy equipment operators and haulers busy long after the headline milestone of first oil.

Kuparuk itself remains one of the state’s economic anchors. ConocoPhillips says the field, located about 40 miles west of Prudhoe Bay, began production in 1981, reached a record 322,000 barrels per day in 1992 and still produced about 63 thousand barrels of oil equivalent per day net across Greater Kuparuk in 2024. In other words, the field is mature, but it is still spending money to keep production moving.

That makes the tent approval part of a wider pattern rather than a stand-alone event. North Slope development often advances through a chain of small regulatory steps, each one feeding the next phase of work. For local businesses, that means continued demand for industrial services, freight, winter logistics and site support. For the borough, it means the region’s older oil fields are still generating the operating activity that underpins jobs and revenue, even when the headlines are about something as modest as a tent.