GeoPetro to pick up Trust Land leases

GeoPetro Resources Company plans to acquire some Alaska Mental Health Trust leases that Pioneer Oil Co. had applied for near Point MacKenzie, north of Anchorage, David Creel, vice president of exploration for GeoPetro, told Petroleum News.

Earlier this year California-based GeoPetro exercised an option to purchase all of Illinois-based Pioneer Oil’s 116,000 acres of state leases, onshore in the Cook Inlet basin.

The Mental Health Trust leases amount to about 3,400 acres and consolidate the land position that Pioneer Oil had acquired in the form of state leases in an area from north of Point MacKenzie to southwest of Wasilla.

The Mental Health Trust leases are “scattered parcels of Trust land,” Mike Franger, senior resource manager at the Trust Land Office, told Petroleum News.

—Alan Bailey