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Providing coverage of Alaska and northern Canada's oil and gas industry
February 2006

Vol. 11, No. 8 Week of February 19, 2006

Rutter buys Prodigy’s Cook Inlet prospect

Midland, Texas-based independent oil and gas company Rutter and Wilbanks Corp. has closed the purchase of the offshore Northern Lights prospect in Southcentral Alaska’s upper Cook Inlet basin from Irving, Texas-based independent Prodigy Alaska, Bill Rutter III told Petroleum News Feb. 16.

Rutter said his company has partners in the deal, and it may add several more before drilling commences.

The 36,000-acre Northern Lights prospect will bring Rutter and Wilbanks’ total acreage in the inlet to 96,000 acres, he said. The new leases are offshore on the North Cook Inlet anticline.

In 2004, Prodigy President Paul Fenemore told Petroleum News that the company’s Northern Lights project has “estimated gross recoverable oil reserves and resource potential in the range of 111-358 million barrels of oil equivalent.”

All of the leases are located in water depths of 100 feet or less and are close to pipelines and oil and gas infrastructure, Fenemore said.

Rutter said he and his partners are working to bring a jack-up rig to Cook Inlet to drill the prospect in 2007.

“It’s possible to get a jack-up rig in this year, but I’m not betting on it,” he said.

Rutter said his company isn’t qualified to operate offshore, but one of his partners would consider being the operator at Northern Lights.

“It’s good news for Alaska, and more evidence that Cook Inlet is going to become the province of the independents,” he said.

Rutter said the company is planning to participate in the state’s Cook Inlet areawide lease sale planned for May.

“We’ve got some ideas there we’d like to pursue, and three prospects onshore on the Kenai Peninsula we’d like to acquire,” he said. “Cook Inlet is our major focus in Alaska now.”

Rutter and Wilbanks was the largest bidder at the state’s 2005 Cook Inlet areawide lease sale, spending more than $314,000 of the $1.5 million bid for 55 tracts in the inlet.

—Steve Sutherlin






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