Pescod's After the Bell today
posted on
Apr 15, 2008 12:48PM
Connacher is a growing exploration, development and production company with a focus on producing bitumen and expanding its in-situ oil sands projects located near Fort McMurray, Alberta
CONNACHER OIL AND GAS (T-CLL) $3.68 n/c
PETROLIFERA PETROLEUM (T-PDP) $10.26 +0.76
Dick Gusella returns a call to us, and we are always appreciativeof the access he affords one, but we hear he is
resting a bit for a while in Hawaii. We are not sure whether
he is trying out his surfing moves while he is there and we
don’t suggest he isn’t, as we have just recently been to
Sayulita, Mexico and seen the surfers there.
A whole bunch of svelte bodies, and I am sure Dick
would fit right in….but anyway on to the serious part of
Connacher, where Gusella and his team recently did an updatewith a conference call that can be listened to.
What next though is what we are after and of course he
is resting up for an annual meeting coming up shortly on
May 13. The two big things Gusella tells us he is looking
ahead to, are first that sometime in the next 30 to 90 days
they should be finally getting EUB approval to start work
on Pod Two, and of course the sooner the better so they
can get a lot of work done in the short summer that is afforded
the area around Fort McMurray.
This is a government agency of course and it answers to
no one other than themselves, and its getting near the end
of what had been expected to be the schedule. The second
thing the company is looking forward to is results of the
core drilling over the past winter, as they get into the number
crunching of just how much they have that can be considered
resource, reserve or all those other technical terms
that are used in the oil and gas business. Needless to say,
those numbers over the longer term become important.
It was certainly disappointing to see that while Connacher’s
production went ever higher over the last few
months because of the market malaise, their stock had
fallen off rather significantly.
It’s nice to see now that production at the Great Divide is
up to 7000 barrels a day plus, the stock looks like it has put
in a bottom and we note that Raymond James has justraised their target on the stock to five dollars from $4.50.
Meanwhile, Gusella does mention that all while production
has ramped up nicely lately the increase in production
numbers over the next while will be at an ever slower rate.
As for Connacher subsidiary Petrolifera Petroleum, Gusellasays that seismic work continues on their much anticipated
projects in Peru (no dates yet for drilling) and it now looks
like they’ll have three interesting wells lined up in Columbia,
as well as ongoing work in Argentina.