Bill Armstrong, bidding as North Slope Exploration LLC, dominated the Bureau of Land Management's 2019 National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska lease sale this morning, dropping more than $10 million for some 960,000 acres. The company has no existing acreage in NPR-A.
"We're back in a big way," Armstrong told Petroleum News after the sale. He said the acreage on which they bid is west of Willow, west of all ConocoPhillips Alaska discoveries in NPR-A.
ConocoPhillips, which has more than a million acres in NPR-A, and is developing two units, Greater Mooses Tooth, already in production, and Bear Tooth, picked up three tracts. Emerald House LLC, which holds 13 tracts in NPR-A, picked up one.
The sale drew bids on 92 tracts, more than a million acres, and had total bids of $11,268,709, BLM Alaska Associate State Director Ted Murphy said at the conclusion of the agency's online bid opening.
The state of Alaska opened bids earlier in the day.
The Alaska Department of Natural Resources' Division of Oil and Gas received no bids for the North Slope Foothills areawide sale or for the three special areas it offered, the Gwydyr Bay, Harrison Bay and Storms blocks.
The Beaufort Sea areawide sale drew 13 bids on 13 tracts from two bidding groups, Samuel Cade 75% and Daniel Donkel 25%, and Narwhal LLC. Bids on 46,290 acres totaled $1,222,360.
The state drew 56 bids on 56 tracts from two bidders in the North Slope areawide sale, with 108,320 acres receiving bids totaling $6,581,990.40 from two bidders, Great Bear Petroleum Ventures II LLC and Oil Search Alaska LLC.
- KRISTEN NELSON
See story in Dec. 15 issue, available Friday, Dec. 13 at www.PetroleumNews.com.
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