₪ David Pescod's Late Edition February 15, 2008
WESTERN WIND ENERGY (V-WND) $2.01 +0.08
ARISE TECHNOLOGIES (T-APV) $1.69 +0.01
About every ten years or so, you get a bit of a mess in the markets, but who would have thought being mainly in natural resources with still high commodity prices, you would be nailed like everyone else. Oh well, oil prices are still at record high levels and if they stay at these levels, sooner or later, people will again care about oil stocks. And if oil prices stay up here, we also suspect the same might happen for alternative energy.
It was just a few weeks ago we featured the article that Harper’s Magazine did in the United States looking at the economic history of the United States and pointing out that over the last few decades, they’ve gone from bubble to bubble to bubble. First high tech, then housing, in between all sorts of other ideas, but their tongue-in-cheek suggestion was that what they needed to get the economy going again...was another bubble. The field that they figured was the most obvious candidate was alternative energy. Once again, it was a great article and very much worth reading.
We had submitted our own portfolio of candidates for alternative energy - Arise Technologies, which has done nothing. Timminco Ltd., which has already had quite a pop (oh my goodness, what a beautiful trader that stock was) and Western Wind Energy. That’s two solar players and one wind energy and yesterday, Western Wind Energy announces that it has secured a new 100 MW wind energy and solar site near Barstow, California.
That means that Western Wind is now one of North America’s largest producer of pure wind energy with 34.5 MW of clean, renewable electrical energy with more than 500 wind turbine generators in California and Arizona. The company also has a wind farm in Grand Manan, New Brunswick.
We’ve already been to one of their sites and folks, they are not pretty. As a matter of fact, they about as ugly as those smoke stacks you see from conventional industry. But if alternative energy is going to create interest down the road and if energy prices stay high, we suspect people are going to care.
If you want to do some background reading, we have a report from Sara Elford on her look at Arise Technologies and Versant Partners, Massimo Fiore has a great look at Western Wind Energy. If you would like a copy of these reports, just e-mail Debbie at Debbie_lewis@canaccord.com.
TERRA ENERGY (V-TTR) $1.54 +0.11
This two-year chart on Terra Energy shows you what many of the very natural gassy stocks have gone through in Alberta over the last while. Lower gas prices, higher drilling costs, higher personnel costs, higher land costs, royalties, you get the drift. All of a sudden though, things are starting to get a little better as drilling costs are way down, land costs are down and suddenly there are people available.
All they need is higher gas prices, but the chart on Terra shows you that things are like some other gas stocks starting to turn around. But Terra also has another asset in its quiver because they have some mineral assets on their Montney project near Fort St. John, BC that they are currently looking to sell.
A previous sell netted the company almost $5 million and further sales will probably add to the kitty, and right now one of the other problems many of the smaller gassy stories are facing, is access to cash. Suddenly the brokers and others in an ugly market aren’t writing cheques the way they used to. So this is definitely good news for Terra and one of the reasons the stock is going.
CONDOR RESOURCES (V-CN) $0.75 -0.08
Condor Resources was one of those junior explorers that
we’ve been watching because so many of the mining analysts and those in the mining community told us it was something you had to watch. With almost a dozen projects from Argentina to Chile to Peru, with excellent management led by Pat Burns, and relatively few shares outstanding, it offered great plays plus leverage. And leverage these days isn’t offered by many junior miners.
However yesterday they came up with some bad news on their Ocros copper project in Peru. Despite the long list of projects, most people are watching only two projects — that’s the Ocros and the Brahma project. Both prospective, big, copper bets and so far the news yesterday on Ocros was not what a person is looking for — rather skimpy grades.
A few holes never make or break a project, but needless to say, that’s not the best of starts.
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