Oil Man Jim Company Oil & Gas Podcast, 2nd October 2019

 

There's been a lot of news so far this week, but mainly companies getting out their interim results at the last minute, so I'll focus on the more interesting ones and those that might offer potential.

 

Providence Resources and Lansdowne Oil & Gas eventually had to call it a day with the Chinese investors after their funds they claimed to have transferred yet again failed to arrive.  Providence now is capitalised at £24 million and Lansdowne at £6 million, but in Barryroe they do actually own a genuine asset.  The shares are highly speculative, but offer huge and real potential.  Estimated 2C recoverable resources are over 300 million barrels of oil from the two main tested reservoir intervals at Barryroe, and further resource potential has also been identified in other hydrocarbon bearing intervals with estimates of up to over 1 billion barrels of oil.  I think Providence and Lansdowne might be worth a punt at these levels.

 

UK Oil & Gas and Alba Mineral Resourcesannounced the spud of the Horse Hill-2/2z Portland well.  Both the HH-2z and the existing HH-1 Kimmeridge well are expected to be put into long term production by the end of 2019.  I suspect production could easily surpass 1,000 barrels of oil per day - and they have permission to drill another four wells.  Given its niche as a British onshore oil producer, UKOG at a current capitalisation of £67 million and ALBA at a capitalisation of £7 million offer opportunity.

 

Global Petroleum is a company rarely mentioned.  It's capitalised at just £3 million, but has a lot of assets, particularly its licences offshore Namibia, which cover 11,607 square kilometres (that's nearly 3 million acres) and make it one of the largest acreage holders in the region.  Global also own licences offshore Italy where it has been fighting actions by environmentalists in the courts - and winning.  It's an interesting situation now in Italy, since to stop these endless battles between oil companies and greens, the Italian Parliament passed a Bill in February this year suspending all hydrocarbon exploration activities, including permit applications, for a period of 18 months. Following the 18 month evaluation period, the intention is that a hydrocarbon plan will be activated, setting out a strategy for exploration and production, excluding certain areas from future hydrocarbon exploitation.  These environmental disputes are what has been holding back oil exploration activity in Italy and those companies whose areas do get approved are going to hit the jackpot, since many of the potential resources in these licences are huge and highly profitable if allowed to be developed.  The company has more than enough cash to keep it going and Global is another one that could be worth a punt.  It just takes one farm-out to propel this North.

 

I3 Energy issued its interim report on Monday and set out a clear explanation of the current situation.  The first well result was a surprise to the third-party consultants who conducted due diligence, which I think explains the heavy institutional selling.  All three sets of seismic utilised to map the Liberator structure had conformed to one another and resolved the 13/23c-9 well location as a low-risk target at a structural high.  However, the targeted upper Captain sand was not penetrated at the first well location, so i3 acquired the only other available seismic dataset over the area. This had previously been reviewed by the Company and determined to be unsuitable.  However, reprocessed, they believe this seismic will enable additional interpretation. To allow time to analyse the data and potentially re-permit an alternative location for Liberator's next appraisal well, i3 is preparing the rig to drill Serenity's SA-01 as the second well. Mobilisation operations will commence as soon as the consent to locate permit is obtained and, once drilling begins, the well is anticipated to take approximately four weeks.  I think the current market capitalisation of £20 million looks fair.  From here, there is going to be an exploration well targeting a potentially significant target at Serenity and possibly an appraisal well at Liberator.  It's no longer the development deal it was before, but like the others mentioned previously it could be an interesting speculation.

 

Independent Oil & Gas which I mentioned positively at the weekend is still being bought by Richard Griffiths of Jersey and Lombard Odier, both of whom filed TR-1s. There's good news flow coming up here and I thought it interesting to see that IG is no longer allowing leveraged purchases on this.  The market capitalisation is £73 million, so there's still plenty of upside when the scale of the project is considered.

 

Finally, Bahamas Petroleum Company, which I stated the last two weekends as currently overpriced but interesting once a placing is done, is now down by about half.  They've now formally announced that they're in the process of arranging funding for their big drill next year and as I've said before it's one to keep an eye on and look at picking up after the placing.

 

I'll be back at the weekend with more on the podcast.

 

In the meantime, all the small-cap oil companies are covered in the blog and daily on Twitter.