Venoco Inc (VQ)

[OilStockReport]

Nice call tommyboy the stock has been building lower lows every sense. This is likely going to change going into the new year though. Venoco's pretty interesting. In a sense, you are really betting on its core gas position in the Sacramento Basin. It provides nice baseline cash flow because it's gas and is well hedged for the next couple of years. One would say, "well that's not very exciting." But the really attractive upside is Venoco's Monterey Shale play. Venoco has a couple of thousand acres there, and it's just Venoco and Occidental Petroleum Corp. (OXY) in this play.

This Monterey Shale is a very interesting oil play on the coast of California. Estimates say there could be more than 100 million barrels in place, though the estimates could be extremely high. This play is almost like an offshore. You have a lot of upside, but you've got a lot of risk because we just don't know about the timing. The company's only going to drill four or five horizontal Monterey Shale wells this year and probably 15–20 next year; so, you're not going to see a ton of results. But as those results unfold, I think you're going to have a lot of people very excited.