|
MMS sale draws $10M ConocoPhillips picks up Sandpiper leases, EnCana goes for large block off NPR-A Kristen Nelson Petroleum News Editor-in-Chief
Three companies bid more than $10 million at the U.S. Minerals Management Service’s Sept. 24 Beaufort Sea sale, with a known field in the central Beaufort and a wildcat area north of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska attracting the most attention. (See map on page 13.)
There were 37 bids on 34 tracts, 15 in Zone “A” and 22 in Zone “B” with total high bids of $8,903, 538, MMS Alaska Regional Director John Goll said in summing the sale results, with $10,175,949 exposed.
ConocoPhillips Alaska took three tracts for $4 million, bidding $2,151,600 on one tract, the highest single bid in the sale, and $1,201,600 and $646,800 on two other tracts. Armstrong Alaska, a subsidiary of Denver-based Armstrong Resources, which bid $2.6 million in the sale and took seven tracts for $1.4 million, also bid on these three tracts.
EnCana was the second highest bidder, at $3,550,158, taking all 24 tracts on which it bid, including a block of 19 tracts north of NPR-A in the Smith Bay area, adjacent to six existing ConocoPhillips-Anadarko Petroleum leases.
ConocoPhillips paid the highest average price per acre, $265.70 for approximately 15,055 acres; Armstrong averaged $36.01 an acre for some 37,600 acres; and EnCana averaged $27.51 an acre for some 129,100 acres.
MMS Director Johnnie Burton said after the sale that she was very pleased with the results.
“We’re showing a couple of large companies that are still big players and we’re seeing an independent” active, which hasn’t happened a lot in that area. Burton also said MMS was “pleased to see that EnCana is really stepping out and going into a wildcat area.” Some tracts near existing exploration Sale 186 is the first MMS Beaufort Sea outer continental shelf lease sale since 1998.
The “A” area bids — closer to shore and to existing infrastructure — included five leases taken by Armstrong Alaska northwest of the company’s existing acreage position in the Oooguruk unit, where Pioneer was operator for the partnership last winter on three exploration wells on state oil and gas leases acquired by Armstrong. Armstrong also took two leases adjacent to blocks of offshore state leases north of the Kuparuk River and Milne Point units.
ConocoPhillips took three “A” leases for $4 million — the leases on which Armstrong also bid — in the area of the old Sandpiper wells, northwest of the Northstar unit.
EnCana took two “A” and three “B” leases offshore on the east side between Badami and Endicott.
EnCana was the only bidder for “B” leases, those farther offshore and farther from infrastructure, bidding on 22 tracts, the three on the east side and the majority in the block north of NPR-A. There are six existing ConocoPhillips-Anadarko leases in this area, Goll told Petroleum News after the sale, “so it appears that people think there’s something there.” But there are no wells in the immediate area. It’s in a hole between exploration wells, he said, and MMS will be very interested to see results of seismic exploration in the area. Armstrong playing off last year’s success Ed Kerr, Denver-based vice president of land and business development for Armstrong, told Petroleum News that some of Armstrong’s bids were for tracts “playing off of our success of last year, drilling in the state waters in the Oooguruk unit.” Other tracts the company won, he said, offset the Milne Point unit.
The tracts where Armstrong bid against ConocoPhillips are in the Sandpiper area, Kerr said. “And they had a bigger bid, of course, a bigger wallet,” and took those tracts.
But, he said: “The things we wanted most, we got, and we’re very excited about it.” The company is looking forward to doing a lot more in the Beaufort, he said, and still has a lot of work to do with acreage it already owns. ConocoPhillips looking for gas Rick Mott, ConocoPhillips Alaska’s vice president of exploration and land, told Petroleum News the company was pleased to win the blocks it bid on. “We thought there would be competition on the blocks and obviously there was. It was an area where there had been drilling historically and gas and oil had been found there, but predominately gas. And this kind of fits with our strategy to be a major gas producer on the North Slope.”
The ConocoPhillips tracts are about 11 miles offshore, he said, and about eight or nine miles from Northstar.
This is the area of the former Sandpiper unit. There have been two wells drilled on the feature, Mott said.
EnCana evaluating Alaska portfolio EnCana spokesman Alan Boras told Petroleum News Sept. 25 that the 24 tracts the company took, some 120,000 acres for approximately $3.5 million, includes about 100,000 acres on the western Beaufort and about 20,000 acres approximately 20 miles northeast of Prudhoe Bay.
Prior to this sale, he said, EnCana had 675,000 net acres in Alaska, about 390,000 in the Foothills, about 230,000 on state land on the North Slope, and about 57,000 acres in NPR-A.
Asked what the company had planned for its newly acquired acreage, Boras said EnCana would evaluate existing seismic data and do exploration evaluation with that existing data, as well as looking at whether the company might acquire additional seismic in the future. “It’s very early days,” he said, but the company will evaluate the prospects on its new leases and plan work in due course.
He said EnCana was pleased with its acquisitions at the sale. It adds to the company’s portfolio of Alaska exploration acreage, he said, and the company continues to evaluate that portfolio.
No wells are planned in Alaska this winter, he said, although the company does plan to drill a well this winter in the Mackenzie Delta.
|
