BNK Petroleum (BKX-T) 5.56 million shares traded yesterday, by far its heaviest volume all year. It did not release any news, but investors may be expecting an update soon on the Hartgraves 1-6H well at the company's Tishomingo field. Hartgraves 1-6H is the second well in BNK's 2017 drill program. The first one, Chandler 8-6H, was drilled and fracked earlier this year and was producing over 300 barrels of oil equivalent a day as of early March. (For context, BNK's total production in March averaged about 1,000 barrels a day.) President and chief executive officer Wolf Regener said BNK would use the "learnings" from Chandler 8-6H to improve the performance of Hartgraves 1-6H. Yet he and BNK's investors are having to wait longer than expected to do so; Hartgraves 1-6H was originally supposed to be fracked in May. BNK evidently ran into delays in finding a service provider. On July 12, BNK announced that it had secured a service provider and would start fracking Hartgraves 1-6H in about two weeks. Assuming that Hartgraves 1-6H performs well, Mr. Regener said the well will be "the next step to quickly increase our production and cash flow ... [and] accelerate the development of the field." He also said the company intends to use the same service provider to frack the third well of this year's drill program, Brock 9-2H, mere weeks after the Hartgraves 1-6H job is completed. This was all said about 2-1/2 weeks ago, so investors are getting itchy for news.
Mr. Regener, for his part, seems bullish. He bought 100,000 shares at 18 cents on July 18, adding to the 50,000 shares that he bought in June. Chairman Ford Nicholson was also a buyer in June, picking up 87,000 shares. Mr. Regener and Mr. Nicholson now respectively own 2.57 million and 6.43 million of BNK's 232 million shares.
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