ConocoPhillips wins approval for Colville River workovers, new drilling plan

The Colville River unit is still paying its way on the western North Slope, and ConocoPhillips Alaska’s new drilling plan shows the company is not ready to let one of the region’s core producers coast. State regulators approved the 2026 plan of development on April 8, giving the company until May 15, 2027, to carry out six well workovers and drill up to five new wells in the Qannik pool of the Narwhal participating area.

That matters because Colville River, better known as Alpine, has moved from growth mode into the harder task of holding production steady. The unit averaged 34,769 barrels per day in 2024, then 31,207 barrels per day in 2025. In February 2026, average output slipped again to 30,234 barrels per day. The new workovers and wells are meant to slow that decline in a field that first came on line more than two decades ago and now remains one of the North Slope’s most important producing areas.

The approval keeps capital flowing through a mature asset that still anchors industrial activity around Nuiqsut and the Colville River Delta. ConocoPhillips says Alpine is about 34 miles west of the Kuparuk River field and eight miles north of Nuiqsut. Development took three years, about six million man-hours and more than $1.3 billion, and the unit now spans more than 134,000 acres across state, Arctic Slope Regional Corp., joint state-ASRC and federal lands. Since 1998, the Colville River unit has been expanded nine times and now includes eight participating areas and eight distinct oil reservoirs.

The production system behind those barrels also links Colville River to the broader North Slope network. The Alpine Central Facility processes crude from Colville River and from ConocoPhillips’ Greater Moose’s Tooth development in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, and the Alpine Oil Pipeline, about 34.2 miles long, carries processed crude to Kuparuk River Unit infrastructure. That connection helps keep a mature field tied into the same processing system that supports other North Slope production.

ConocoPhillips also said it met the commitments in its 2025 plan, including 14 scale-inhibition treatments, and advanced multiyear upgrades to fire-and-gas systems and instrument-control and safety systems. Engineering for CD4 pad upgrades is expected to finish by the end of 2026, and additional electrical and instrumentation tie-ins were completed in 2025 to prepare for future wells. For North Slope residents watching jobs, production and local revenues, the message is clear: Colville River is still being reinvested in, not wound down.