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State gets bids on 27 tracts in areawide Cook Inlet lease sale Six bidders, bidding groups ante up $919,752 on some 100,480 acres Kristen Nelson PNA News Editor
Forcenergy Inc. was the most active bidder at the state’s 2000 Cook Inlet areawide oil and gas lease sale, held Aug. 16 in Anchorage. The company took 13 of 27 tracts receiving bids on the sale.
There were 27 bids on 27 tracts, Division of Oil and Gas Director Ken Boyd said before the bids were read. Because title and adjudication work for areawide sales is done only after the bids are opened, Boyd said, the $919,752 sum of bids submitted is the maximum amount the state will receive. The number will get a little smaller when the exact acreage in the tracts is established, he said. Forcenergy filling in Forcenergy Inc. bid on and won 13 tracts, and at $36.01 per acre bid on tract 203 also had the highest per-acre bid at the sale. Unocal took five tracks, followed by Aurora Gas and a 50-50 partnership of Wagner and Gilbertson with three tracts each, Phillips Alaska with two tracts and Marathon Oil with one.
Forcenergy accounted for 49 percent of the bid money, $449,440, followed by Unocal with 22 percent ($201,773), Phillips Alaska 11 percent ($98,861), Aurora gas at 8 percent ($76,302), Wagner/Gilbertson at 6 percent ($58,470) and Marathon at 4 percent ($34,906).
“We were basically filling in around tracts and prospects that we had acquired in the 1999 areawide lease sale,” said Jim Arlington, land manager for Forcenergy’s Alaska division. He said the company is still “evaluating the property that we acquired last year” so “it’s too early to say whether the tracts we picked up today would be developed into exploration prospects.”
This acreage, he said, is what is “commonly referred to as protection acreage” around other Forcenergy tracts. Most leasing middle, south Nine of the tracts leased Aug. 16 were south of Soldotna, seven of those north and east/southeast of Anchor Point. The bulk of the 27 tracts leased, 17, were grouped between the Beluga River gas field in the north and West Forelands in the south.
Marathon Oil Co. took a single tract, No. 58, north/northeast of existing Marathon acreage at Cape Kasilof on the lower Kenai Peninsula.
Phillips Alaska Inc. took two tracts, Nos. 805 and 807, on the lower Kenai Peninsula northwest of Anchor Point south of a tract the company holds from Cook Inlet areawide sale 1999.
Aurora Gas took three tracts, all on the west side: No. 367 in Cook Inlet west of Granite Point; No. 447 mostly onshore southwest of Nicolai Creek gas field; and No. 545, east of the Pretty Creek and Beluga River gas fields.
Richard Wagner (50 percent) and Dan Gilbertson (50 percent) took three widely spaced tracts: No. 287 in Cook Inlet southeast of the North Middle Ground Shoal gas field; No. 487 in north Cook Inlet east of the North Cook Inlet gas field; and No. 803, offshore/onshore northeast of Anchor Point.
Unocal took five tracts, all in the lower Kenai Peninsula. No. 729 east of Ninilchik and Nos. 793, 798, 810 and 811, a block of tracts east and southeast of the North Fork gas field east of Anchor Point.
Forcenergy took 13 tracts: Nos. 202, 203, 244 and 251 are mostly offshore, extending existing Forcenergy acreage on West Forelands to the east. Nos. 304, 305, 307 and 308 are a block of tracts offshore northeast of West Forelands. Nos. 279, 353, 346 and 347 extend existing Forcenergy acreage southwest of the North Cook Inlet gas field where ARCO Alaska drilled in the early 1990s looking for southern extensions of Sunfish. No. 375 is west of acreage in which Forcenergy is a partner in Trading Bay.
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