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Foothills pulls $359,424 Alaska areawide Foothills lease sale draws two bidders; Alaska Peninsula zero Kristen Nelson & Eric Lidji Petroleum News
The Alaska Division of Oil and Gas received no bids at the Alaska Peninsula areawide sale and 12 bids on 12 tracts in the North Slope Foothills areawide sale, for a total of $359,424. The two sales were held in Anchorage on Feb. 27.
The bidders in the Foothills sale were Union Energy (Alaska) LLC, which was apparent high bidder on some tracts in last year’s North Slope areawide lease sale, and Harold Green. (See information on Union Energy in this issue, page 7.)
Green, the high bidder on three tracts west of the Dalton Highway between Sagwon and Happy Valley Camp, runs Alaska Green Realty Inc. in Anchorage.
Of the many companies registered under his name with the state, the only one with clear ties to oil and gas is Expolar Corp., an exploration and prospecting company he started in the early 1980s.
Green is also an honorary consul of the Republic of Seychelles, an archipelago nation of the eastern coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean.
He registered with the state as a qualified bidder on Feb. 14.
Both bidders at $5.20 an acre Green bid $5.20 an acre — the minimum bid was $5 an acre — for three tracts west of the Dalton Highway near existing Unocal tracts. Green bid a total of $89,856, a quarter of the total.
The Union Energy (Alaska) bids, also at $5.20 an acre, were on a block of tracts in the western area of the sale south of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Union Energy bid a total of $269,568, three-quarters of the total. At least some of the tracts on which Union Energy bid appear to be Native lands.
In its sale announcement the division said its regional tract map shows all tracts within the sale area, but “reflects state acreage (both conveyed and selected/topfiled), federal acreage and ASRC (Arctic Slope Regional Corp.) acreage (both conveyed and selected).”
The division said the state has topfiled some ASRC acreage, allowing the state “to request acreage that is not currently available for selection, but may at some future time be available for selection and conveyance to the state.” Only lands within the sale area that have been conveyed to the state and are not covered by existing or pending leases as of Nov. 14, 2007, will be available for leasing, the division said, and cautioned bidders “to verify state title to acreage within these townships/tracts prior to bidding.”
The division evaluates lands within tracts receiving bids after the sale, a process that may take several months, and will exclude from leases acreage it doesn’t own, acreage already leased or acreage with clouded title claims.
Not a lot of bids expected Kathy Means, the division’s manager of lease sales and lease administration, said after the sale that the division didn’t expect a lot of bids because nothing new has really happened in those areas.
The state holds annual sales as part of its areawide program so that industry has access to acreage on a regular basis, she said.
The first areawide Foothills sale, in 2001, brought in $9.8 million in high bids on almost 860,000 acres, followed by $2.9 million on almost 214,000 acres at the second sale in 2002. Sales since then topped out at almost $320,000 in 2005.
The state began Alaska Peninsula areawide sales in 2005 and in that first sale some 191,000 acres drew a total of $1.15 million in high bids. At a second sale, in 2007, a single bidder bid $38,789 for a single tract.
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