Picking up pieces

Bidders grab 27 tracts in tight Cook Inlet sale; Prodigy largest bidder

Kristen Nelson

Petroleum News Editor-in-Chief

The state of Alaska drew $887,042.60 in high bids at its 2003 Cook Inlet areawide oil and gas lease sale in Anchorage May 7 as bidders picked up bits and pieces of acreage in the heavily leased basin. (See map on page 13.)

Bonnie Robson, deputy director of the Alaska Division of Oil and Gas, said the Cook Inlet bids covered 103,680 acres; a single bid in the North Slope Foothills areawide sale was for a 5,760-acre tract.

Robson read 28 bids for 27 Cook Inlet tracts, along with the single bid for in the foothills sale, $6.35 an acre from EnCana Oil & Gas USA, for $36,576, a total of $923,618.60 for both sales.

The EnCana bid is for a tract adjacent to a large Anadarko Petroleum-EnCana lease block south-southwest of Sagwon on the Dalton Highway and west of Anadarko's Dolly Varden Prospect.

In Cook Inlet, Prodigy Alaska has five Cook Inlet leases in a block south of ConocoPhillips' leases at the North Cook Inlet unit. The company picked up seven leases in this sale for $415,369, 47 percent of the sale's dollar volume, paying $21.75 an acre for tract 352, $30.75 an acre for tract 345 and $33.28 an acre for tract 420, the highest per-acre bids in the sale.

Prodigy's new leases are on both flanks of existing acreage positions — including its own block of leases — running south-southwest down the middle of Cook Inlet starting at the North Cook Inlet unit and gas field. Prodigy's $21-$33 an acre leases are on the east side of this acreage block, two adjacent to Prodigy's existing leases. On the west side of existing acreage the company paid $7.39 an acre for three tracts and $12.71 an acre for one tract. (See Prodigy story on page 11.)

Also taking seven leases, for a total of $134,400, 15 percent of the sale's dollar volume, was a bidding group of Douglas Barr, Dan Donkel, George Casper and Robert Bolt (25 percent each). All bids by this group were $5 an acre for mostly single tracts on both sides of Cook Inlet. On the Kenai Peninsula the tracts are south of the Marathon-operated Kenai unit, west of the Unocal-operated Birch Hill unit and gas field and north of Birch Hill. On the west side the group took two offshore tracts in the Trading Bay area, a tract south of the ConocoPhillips' operated Beluga River gas field and a tract between Pelican Hill and Forest acreage west of the McArthur River field.

Pelican Hill took three tracts for $65,740.80, all at $8.56 an acre, on the west side adjacent to acreage the company already holds near the Beluga River gas field and unit.

Unocal took two tracts for $60,652.80, paying $5.21 and $5.32 an acre. The tracts are on the southern Kenai Peninsula, one east of Ninilchik and well east of existing state leases and the other adjacent to existing Unocal leases near the North Fork gas field northeast of Anchor Point.

A 50-50 partnership of Dan Donkel and Kenneth Mehaffey took two tracts for $57,600, paying $5 an acre. The tracts are on the Kenai Peninsula, adjacent to tracts acquired by the Barr-Donkel-Casper-Bolt bidding group. One is south of the Kenai unit and gas field, the other is north of Birch Hill gas field.

Forest Oil took three tracts for $56,396.80, paying $7.01 an acre for two tracts and $8.01 an acre for the third. The $8.01-an-acre tract extends Forest's position at West Foreland. The other two are in the vicinity of the Unocal-operated South Granite Point and North Middle Ground Shoal fields.

Marathon Oil took one tract for $6.03 an acre, a total of $34,732.80. This acreage is west of the Marathon-operated Ninilchik unit on the Kenai Peninsula.

A bidding partnership of Monte Allen (62.5 percent), Laurel Bassett (26 percent) and Mary Goldstein (12.5 percent) took one tract for $5.52 an acre for a total of $31,795.20. This tract is shoreward of a tract Allen holds on the west side of Cook Inlet just north of Harriet Point; Allen also holds a 50 percent interest in a tract to the north. These properties are west of Kalgin Island.

Monte Allen took a tract south of Kalgin Island for $5.27 an acre, a total of $30,355.20. Allen also holds the tract immediately to the north, and is a partner in a group of tracts running up the inlet from Kalgin Island to Forest's holdings at Redoubt Shoal.

Fishing for answers

Kay Cashman, Petroleum News publisher & manag

“We were concerned about the fact that only one bid on one tract was received for the foothills areawide sale,” Bonnie Robson told Petroleum News, referring to the $36,576 bid EnCana Oil & Gas USA made for a 5,760-acre tract.

Robson, who opened the bids, said the state “expected more bids based on the three previous foothills lease sales.”

Robson doesn’t know why only one company bid but she would like to know.

“One possibility for the poor showing might be the limits placed by the state of Alaska on how much (exploration) acreage one company can hold (500,000 acres each); others might be concerned about access to capacity in the (proposed) natural gas pipeline. But there might be other reasons as well and we would like to hear from both individuals and the public on those reasons,” Robson said.

When asked if she knew how much interest industry was showing in the upcoming North Slope and Beaufort Sea areawide lease sales, Robson said she did not.

“There are different factors that may influence a company’s decision to participate in one lease sale over another. For example, the likelihood of oil prospects in the Beaufort Sea and North Slope are higher than in the Brooks Range Foothills (where the May 7 acreage was offered) because the foothills are more gas prone,” she said.

State pleased with Cook Inlet bids

“You could see from the bids that a lot of different areas of the inlet held interest for bidders. Much of the acreage has been leased previously and so there was less available acreage than in past sales,” she said.