In a move that Chief Executive Officer Gwyn Morgan recently referred to as going “back to our roots” EnCana has added its Alaska properties to the list of worldwide conventional oil and gas assets it is selling in order to focus its attention on what Morgan says EnCana does best – develop and produce unconventional oil and gas assets in North America.
As announced in a Dec. 10 News Bulletin, EnCana’s decision to pull out of Alaska followed earlier announcements to sell its oil and gas properties in the Gulf of Mexico, North Sea and Ecuador.
EnCana is just beginning the process of preparing for the sale of its Alaska acreage, Paul Myers told Petroleum News this morning.
Myers, who is EnCana’s vice president for the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, was interviewed by PN in late October when the company dropped its leases in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
At that time Myers said there was “one area” in Alaska that EnCana was “most interested in,” and the NPR-A leases weren’t in it, he said, declining to identify the area.
In this morning’s interview Myers said the “OCS has been our main focus in Alaska. It’s the area we picked and have been working on evaluating prospects from G&G to get them drilled. … The majority of our technical work has been in the OCS.”
The U.S. Minerals Management Service said EnCana has 24 leases on Alaska’s Outer Continental Shelf, encompassing some 52,265 acres in the Beaufort Sea.
“We also have a significant presence in the (Brooks Range) Foothills. … We were sitting and waiting on gas line issues to be resolved,” Myers said, the biggest issue being timing and the second access for explorers.
However, Myers said the North Slope natural gas pipeline issues had nothing to do with EnCana’s decision to pull out of Alaska.
“We were quite keen on the OCS. It’s just that EnCana’s focus is not going to be on that type of play,” he said.
