Know this; there are some legitimate small companies in Cook Inlet, such as Prodigy, Aurora, Forest (which has actually installed a platform and proceeded to downgrade estimated reserves from 56,000,000 bbl to 8,000,000 bbl), and Pelican Hills, which recently pulled out after drilling several dry holes. I'm on contract to Unocal, which has 9 platforms and 2 onshore production facilities, and Conoco-Phillips, which has one platform, one onshore facility and an LNG plant which, in partnership with Marathon, exports LNG to the far east. I have shown the AKOL press releases to the people who run this field; they have no idea who AKOL is. AKOL themselves have not been forthcoming when I questioned them directly as to the location of the Fowler Prospect, referring me to their moronic website.
Escopeta Oil & Gas has 128,000 acres of leases adjacent to the producing field in Cook Inlet. A retired Unocal geologist has reworked existing seismic data using a new method and believes there are trillions of cubic feet of gas and hundreds of millions of barrels of oil on these leases, but it is far deeper than the existing field. Getting to it will be a huge, incredibly expensive gamble. Escopeta is a small independent without the resources to attempt this on their own. Even the majors wouldn't touch this on their own. One dry hole on the Steelhead platform cost Unocal almost 13 million dollars, and it was nowhere near as deep as Escopeta needs to go. That was drilled from a production platform, alleviating the need for a jack-up rig which costs up to $100,000 per day.
This is all verifiable. What is not verifiable is the ethics of people who make money on bogus press releases. A legitimate oil company would have more than a website and an answering service pretending to be their administration. The only reason I ever got involved in this is because this field is dying. There are 4 "lighthouse" platforms, shut in, unmanned and only producing enough gas to run the marker lights. This whole field would have been gone in the 80's if the State would have allowed Unocal to cut the platforms off at the mudline and tow them to deep water and sink them. The State said no, you will cut them off 40 feet below the mudline and bring them onshore for bioremediation. The upshot of this is that it would cost 15 to 20 million per platform to remove them. Thusly, the Cook Inlet oilfield survived. Unocal would be out of here today if they had their way, but it was too expensive.
The recent oil price spike has led Unocal to invest some money in existing production facilities which have been allowed to decline in the abandonment mode under which they had been operating. Oil needs to remain over $35.00 per barrel to make this field viable, so this may be an ephemeral phenomenon. So far, Unocal has not committed to punching new holes, only reworking existing wells to increase production.
My livelihood depends on this oilfield. That is why, when Frontier Oil and Gas showed up on my Yahoo home page last October, I was interested. I work in an oilfield support industry; I don't care who uses our services as long as someone keeps my paycheck coming. Oil companies are pretty secretive when it comes to their plans for the future, and they have been known to disinform for strategic purposes. I don't claim to know what the future will bring in Cook Inlet, but I have been observing it closely for over 25 years. You say I'm questionable? Bring your extensive knowledge to the table.
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