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Gold/Mining/Energy : The New Osprey Limited -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Osprey who wrote (112)	7/11/2001 7:35:23 AM
From: kidl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 338

VERY nice :-) News from The Globe and Mail Ambitious firms looking for piece of petroleum action -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Advertisement -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kevin Cox 06:41 GMT-04:00 Wednesday, July 11, 2001 HALIFAX -- In a house on a sleepy, small-town street in Bridgewater, N.S., one of the most ambitious junior oil companies on the east coast -- Osprey Energy Ltd. -- is planning exploration projects at home, in Alberta and on Prince Edward Island. Near the town of Sussex, the dairy capital of New Brunswick, another fast-moving small company, Corridor Resources Inc. of Halifax, is drilling its third natural gas well and hoping to start production late this year. In the bright red mud near Souris, PEI, a Toronto-based junior Meteor Creek Resources Inc. is beginning tests to determine whether its Bear River wildcat gas well will be the first natural gas producer on Canada's smallest province. All three companies are among a growing number of small exploration concerns that have sprouted up over the past six years. The East Coast industry has long been dominated by the petroleum giants such as Mobil, Exxon, Petro-Canada and PanCanadian Petroleum, which have the deep corporate pockets to finance billion-dollar offshore energy projects. But the construction of the Maritime & Northeast Pipeline to move natural gas to the northeastern United States has allowed junior companies to look for a piece of the petroleum action. They are reanalyzing decades-old data that indicate large onshore natural gas deposits in the Maritime Basin, which includes parts of all three Maritime provinces and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. "If you found gas onshore in the Maritimes 10 years ago, it was a big yawn -- what would you ever do with it?" Norman Miller, president of Corridor said in an interview. "The pipeline was one of the big changes. The East Coast is just becoming more and more in vogue and visible as a competing energy play to Western Canada and the North." Some analysts are quick to point out to investors that the junior companies such as Osprey, Meteor Creek and Corridor are all involved in speculative exploration ventures. The juniors are also running up against some resistance from investors who balk at putting big bucks into prospective gas plays in areas that don't have the proven track record of Alberta, British Columbia or Saskatchewan. Gary Malone, president of Osprey, is used to investors being taken aback by his company's south shore Nova Scotia address. Osprey's head office was moved to Bridgewater from Calgary about four years ago, and the company began an aggressive acquisition program of petroleum properties in Louisiana, Alberta and onshore Nova Scotia. Osprey attracted some interest from analysts as it became involved in three joint ventures in Louisiana over the past two years. Those fields, bought as petroleum prices were plummeting, are now pumping the equivalent of about 1,200 barrels of oil a day. Osprey's revenue from its Louisiana and Alberta properties leapt to $1.94-million for the nine months ended March 31, compared with $306,000 for the same time in fiscal 2000. Osprey's profit was $272,000, compared with a loss of $131,000 the year before. "Now we can afford to start planning for a year and a half or two years out, and we can start getting involved in these exploration plays," Mr. Malone said. In May, Osprey took a 21-per-cent interest in a gas play in West-central Alberta and also has a 15-per-cent interest in a 200,000-acre area near Parrsboro, N.S., where seismic testing will begin soon. It also recently acquired a 10-per-cent interest in a 654,000-acre exploration block on PEI. But the most-watched onshore play in the Maritimes is near the southern New Brunswick town of Sussex. Corridor Resources, in partnership with Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan, has sunk three wells, and tests from one of the wells showed a potential for production of eight billion cubic feet over 20 years. Work on the other two wells is continuing. Corridor president Mr. Miller said production to fuel a nearby potash facility could start as early as late this year. He said much of the interest around the onshore plays was sparked by the increased number of industrial plants that can burn natural gas and the availability of the pipeline to ship it. kcox@globeandmail.ca