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Cook Inlet partner eyeing North Slope Largest Alaska Beaufort Sea bidder GMT Exploration comes from hedge fund stock, already North Fork unit leaseholder Eric Lidji For Petroleum News
GMT Exploration, the big bidder at the state’s Beaufort Sea lease sale on Feb. 24, is a newcomer to the North Slope, but the Denver-based independent is not completely new to Alaska.
GMT Exploration is a subsidiary of GMT Capital Corp., a private investment firm founded in 1990 that manages several hedge funds. The exploration arm is active in the Green River basin in Wyoming and the East Texas basin, and in recent years has flirted with prospects in other mid-continent basins, as well as some international areas.
The company became incorporated in Alaska in October 2005. In May 2009, the state Division of Oil and Gas certified GMT Exploration as a qualified company in Alaska.
As of March 1, the state listed GMT Exploration’s Alaska holdings at nearly 5,000 acres, all in the Cook Inlet basin. The company holds a minority working interest in 20 leases, most of those a roughly 19.1 to 30 percent stake in leases in and around the North Fork unit at the southern end of the Kenai Peninsula some 10 miles north of Homer.
North Fork is operated by Armstrong Cook Inlet, a subsidiary of Denver-based Armstrong Oil and Gas, an independent famous for bringing new players to Alaska over the past decade. On many of the leases at North Fork GMT holds the second largest stake, after an independent named Dale Resources Alaska.
Production goal at North Fork Armstrong wants to bring North Fork into production for the first time since Standard Oil of California discovered natural gas there in 1965. Armstrong and its partners, operating as Anchor Point Energy, got a boost late last year when the Regulatory Commission of Alaska approved a supply contract with regional distributor Enstar Natural Gas.
That victory may have spurred GMT Exploration to take further chances on Alaska.
At the Beaufort Sea lease sale, GMT Exploration took 10 tracts with bids totaling $540,806.40, or 66.9 percent of the sale. The company also had the highest per-acre bid, $81.59 for tract 411 adjacent to the western border of the offshore Oooguruk unit. GMT Exploration’s second-highest per-acre bid was $43.07 for tract 407, on the northern edge of Oooguruk.
Anadarko Petroleum held tract 411 until it expired in August 2009. Pioneer Natural Resources, the operator of Oooguruk, held tract 407 until it expired in July 2009.
Pioneer continues to report successes at Oooguruk, increasing reserve estimates and production rates, taking on more ambitious drilling programs and considering expansion.
In a pleasant bit of oil patch symmetry, Armstrong drilled the original exploration wells at Oooguruk in the early years of the 2000s (when the prospect was known as Northwest Kuparuk) and brought in Pioneer Natural Resources, who ultimately developed the field.
The remaining eight leases GMT took in the Beaufort Sea sale are in state waters north of the Colville River unit — adjacent to a block of leases Armstrong took in an earlier sale, bidding under the name 70 & 148 LLC.
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