most studied petroleum systems7 Jan 2015 11:26
I joked when I saw the new strategic direction being taken by Tangiers Petroleum (LON:TPET) under Dave Wall that a name change was in order.
It turns out the company will ditch the moniker after the failure of the TAO-1 well off the coast of Morocco, in which the AIM listed explorer had a 25% interest.
Success could have been transformational for Tangiers, but as Wall points out TAO-1 was always high risk and wasn’t the primary reason he came into the company.
“It was more like an option for us. Our skillset is starting companies,” the Tangiers managing director told Proactive Investors.
He and director Stephen Staley, one of the executives behind the success of Cove Energy, are keen to talk about the next project.
It takes the business from the warm Atlantic waters off the coast of northern Africa to an altogether more inhospitable environment: Alaska.
In all, it is snapping up almost 100,000 acres on the state’s North Slope.
The recent announcement from the company revealed the group had teamed up with a firm called Burgundy Xploration on Project Icewine.
The driving force behind Burgundy is a petroleum geologist called Paul Basinski.
Few outside the world of oil and gas will have heard of him. But to those who know the industry, he is something of a cult figure.
For Basinski was a key player in the discovery of the prolific Eagle Ford shale play in Texas and New Mexico.
His work straddled his time at Burlington Resources and then ConocoPhillips after the former’s US$36bn takeover.
Not many of Basinski’s peers believed him when he said that careful analysis of the geology pointed to a vast unconventional oil and gas resource in the area.
After all this was Texas – a state that has been punctured more times that a pin cushion in the search for oil.
But his hunch proved correct and Conoco ended up with 320,000 acres in the sweet spot of the Eagle Ford that has made the firm a good deal of money since.
Basinski believes the untapped potential of Alaska’s North Slope, famed for the giant Prudhoe Bay discovery, lies with an unconventional play called the HZM, located around 11,000 feet below the surface.
However, there is a double whammy here as Tangiers’ neighbour, Great Bear, is also chasing a higher-lying, potentially prolific conventional ‘turbiditic’ play.
Only with the advent of advanced 3D technology have explorers been able to discern potential game-changing conventional targets below the perma-frost.
With a 60% chance of success, hopes are high that Great Bear can hit a home run with one of its three wells scheduled between January and May next year.
Given that one of the wells is only a mile-and-a-half from Tangiers’ project, success would have a positive knock-on impact on the value of Tangiers’ nearby 100,000 acres.
With $1mln in treasury, the plan is to go out to raise around $6mln to fund the full pu
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