Gulf Keystone Petroleum Share Discussion Threads

[nestoframpers] 12/5/2021 20:43

Rudaw

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — US congressman Michael Waltz has told Rudaw’s Roj Eli Zalla that a small US troop presence in Iraq is important in providing security for the US and its allies.

“We provide a lot of very valuable support and I fully appreciate and know that it's the Peshmerga and the Iraqi army that's doing the real fighting, but the support that we provide and intelligence and logistics… is critical.”

“For that reason, a small presence, I do think, is important. We get a lot of benefit for our allies and for American security by having that small amount of soldiers in Iraq and standing with the Kurds,” he added.

Waltz, who submitted a resolution to the US congress in late April on Operation Provide Comfort, also explained his reasons for sponsoring the bill.

“The Kurds are a fantastic, cultural people and steadfast ally of the United States. This operation, I think allowed the Kurdish people, the freedom and the oxygen, so to speak and the space from the murderous Saddam Hussein regime, to really kind of get back on their feet and to establish themselves politically, economically from a civil society standpoint,”

“I want to commemorate and remind everyone that the United States military, the United States government stepped in to prevent another massacre through this operation. And I think the Kurdish people, the region, and our relationship was far better for it.”

[nestoframpers] 12/5/2021 19:11

First time Hamas has fired rockets at Jerusalem since the 2014 Gaza War. It also comes a few weeks after Joe Biden restored millions in funding to Palestinian orgs on the grounds that the Trump admin froze them.

[nestoframpers] 12/5/2021 19:08

Swanrodin , Rodinswan , whats going on ?

[swanrodin] 12/5/2021 16:35

Fantastic selection of posts on the Proactive presentation and done so promptly. By the time I got home you had reported on nearly everything so I will concentrate on what has not been covered and just re-emphasise a couple of points that have already been made. In addition I will attempt to clarify a few things that Ewen had said and not said during that evening by reference to a phone call that I had with John Gerstenlauer , the COO, today.

PI Presentation and Evening Discussion
• The first thing I learnt was how to pronounce “ Shaiken”!
• They were completely surprised that DGA included the speculative gas volumes underneath the drilled intervals. He believes they made the estimate by looking at the Jabal Kand well logs.
• I asked him whether they had conducted an assay on the oil recovered from the well tests but he wasn’t able to say so we are no wiser on the potential discount to Brent.
• John G’s estimate of 30-35% RF for Shaikan comes from his experience on a heavy oil field in Yemen that is naturally fractured.
• Sh-2 will cost about $25MM. Ewan said they are going to modify their drilling technique to try to improve drilling rates.
• During the presentation he pointed to two locations for future appraisal wells one of which was on the eastern edge of the structure. He did not mention the shallow well in the presentation that we have seen tender information on and said afterwards that the well is not confirmed, they are only thinking about it (but this was later clarified by JG).
• I was surprised to learn that the seismic line spacing on Shaikan is 4km. You could miss half the N Sea satellite tie backs with that spacing. But of course Shaikan is 35-40 km long so they have 10 lines across it (Nth – Sth). This helps explain the uncertainty in closure contour. The mapping program has to interpolate/extrapolate across the 4km spacing or beyond the final line. BBBS or Ads_lon could comment more but I recall course 2-D surveys typically have 1 -2 km line spacing.
• The Etamic deal was done about the end of June. He described how delays occur in obtaining approvals/signatures in terms of how difficult it is to get time with those with the authority to approve deals. The latter two points and their concern about seeps on Shaikan possibly equating to the structure having leaked (down to a residual, immovable oil saturation) do explain the Etamic deal. GKP must have lacked confidence in the seal to have offered the terms that they, sorry he, got.
• I found Ewen a very straight guy, nothing in the body language to worry those concerned about the Etamic deal.
• It was really good to hear that GKP took planning for the well tests very seriously. Due to the concerns about the H2S they went to the extent of planning to temporarily re-house the nearby villagers. Ewan said the last thing they wanted to do was gas the Kurds! Apparently they had set a precedent as no one had talked to the local authority before about H2S issues. It is an important operational point. There would be serious implications if a major incident took place and it is better they err well on the side of safety.
• The 13Bn OIP P1 has still not been explained properly and I think Ewen contributed to the confusion. I will cover this in a separate note because the key learning could be relevant if you hold other small oil stocks, especially Kurdistan ones.

So a great evening, it was good to meet you dhatrader and although we didn’t exchange names I know I must have met several more of you based on the same conversations we heard whilst pinning Ewen against the wall during the drinks/canapé session.

Oh nearly forgot to mention the CNN interview. Ewan said that Todd was not aware the camera was running, he thought they were having an informal discussion.


Phone Call with JG Today
• JG was bullish on the recovery factor based on his experience with the Masik? Field in Yemen which he described as starting out at 240,000 bopd and still producing about 200,000 bopd 18 years later. It was of a similar gravity and very low GOR but the wells still produced at high rates through the fracture network. However this must be going back a few years as I can’t find any mention of it and the entire country only produces 400-500,000 bopd nowadays. We also discussed recovery mechanisms but he asked for his speculative comments not to be put in a blog.
• He was also confident that the drilling performance would improve markedly on Sh-2 now they know what they are dealing with. There was a lost circulation zone at about 500m that caused a lot of difficulties. If this is known ahead of time normal procedure would be to plan the casing program with this in mind and run casing once through the zone and cement off the trouble zone behind pipe. If you have not planned for this and do set pipe this means that you have used up one of your casing strings and of course the subsequent hole size is reduced. The consequence is that you have one casing string too few and run the risk of not being able to get to TD. GKP elected not to run pipe and soldiered on to the next planned casing point running into difficulty drilling ahead. They will amend their casing program on Sh-2 to avoid the difficulties of Sh-1.
• We also talked about the famous pressure gradient plot. He said the pressure information was extremely good and there was high confidence in the data. He inferred that DGA had seen it and in their report they refer to GKP’s pressure build up analysis but don’t say that they have interpreted it independently. He also said they could see tidal effects which is a bit strange in the middle of the desert!
• JG said they were mostly focused on proving areal extent in Sh-2 and not actively searching for the OWC. It would be ideal for the biggest movement in share price if they could position it sufficiently down dip to do both. It will be down dip but finding the OWC does not seem to be in the top priority at the moment.
• It was good to hear GKP have a few people with H2S experience. He was involved in developing the record highest H2S property in the US, 86% H2S. Nasty stuff!
• He confirmed Ewen’s comments about the DGA gas estimates. There was a very good correlation between the JK-1 well and Sh-1 even though they are 26km apart. The high P interval in Sh-1 is a thick interval in JK-1 and led to DGA’s confidence to issue the very significant gas estimates. GKP are planning to have the capability to handle higher pressures than they saw at TD in case they were still in a transition zone when they had to abandon drilling so they should be able to get into the Permian.
• The 5000bopd rates shown for the Butmah in a couple of the recent presentations are a typo. They estimated the rate as nearer to 2000bopd even though it did not flow to surface.
• The test in Sh-1 will comprise a separate 1 day test in each of the DST 2 and 3 intervals. DST 2 only flowed at 120 bbl/d and DST 3 was the Butmah. An ESP will be used to pump the intervals to demonstrate that they can be produced at commercial rates. The extended test will be on the DST 1 interval in the Sargelu that produced at 7400 bbl/d. He implied they would not be pumping this interval which infers that the well was choked back on test if they they think it is capable of the 10,000 bbl/d that has been mentioned consistently in presentations.
• JG was very confident that they would drill the shallow well once the Sh-1 well is put on long term test. I said this would be a useful addition to the OIP at which point he laughed. Apparently they feel (rightly) that they have found a massive amount of oil but every time he speaks to a PI they want more (lol).
• JG said that he has never seen a well like this in his 35 yrs (me too) and that they will be writing papers about the technical analysis of it for years to come. Apparently they all were walking around the office looking like they had won the lottery as the well unfolded.
• On Sh-1 MOL were good partners and didn’t hassle GKP to issue information. On AB-1 MOL are drilling it as a tight hole. JG said they were trying to repay the favour and would issue an RNS when it was required by AIM rules but it sounded like they wouldn’t be trying to broadcast at every opportunity. They will be negotiating the amount of information to be released.
• Finally he mentioned, as did Ewen, that they were looking for opportunities to acquire additional interest in other licences.

A good guy, very accessible. I was most impressed, I called the London office this morning and got a call back within an hour or so from the US at what must have been about 05:30 a.m. That’s being pretty responsive to a shareholder call.

Regards,
Gramacho

[broadford bay] 12/5/2021 16:30

Not amazing, just cleverly- and easily done to confound.

...a bit like putting out a 400k pipeline tender when you have no intention of ever carrying it thru. Costs:Benefit effect and PR value wow!

Encourage them to think good thoughts.

Way to go!

[habshan] 12/5/2021 16:06

Broadford - "Lansdown doesn't need to notify unless they drop below 15% or go above 20%.They are trading the pants off it you mugs, regular 10% moves up and down will do very nicely."

Well if that's what they're doing it's very strange that when Orient Capital update the register every two weeks Lansdowne have always arrived back at exactly 15.36%.

And all of the others are showing the same percentages as the last update to two decimal places as well, apart from UBS who are down 0.2%.

And all done to coincide with Orient Capital updating the register every two weeks.

Amazing.

[swanrodin] 12/5/2021 15:01

GKP BBBS 26 Nov 2010 'New OIP RNS'

Remember that ceremony? You know, the one where Adnan Samarrai (GKP Country Manager, Kurdistan) said ".. and the total inventory of the area Samarrai said the stock is so massive and beyond expectations and we can not give the figures", (refer last sentence):

hxxp://www.lalishduhok.org/modules.php

Well, Samarrai's preceding remarks about 10,000 BOPD and 30,000 BOPD sounds an awful lot like an RNS I read recently too. How about that, this guy seems to be a bit of a clairvoyant with regard to predicting an RNS that 'can not give figures' for OIP but can mention flow rates.Do you think there was anything else in that ceremony report that may be relevant?

How about the title - "Opening of the largest oil field in Iraq .." perhaps qualified in the first sentence by "since 1976".Well, the Majnoon Field, discovered in 1977, has 12 BBLS, (refer Table 1):
hxxp://www.searchanddiscovery.net/documents/gong03/images/gong03.pdf

Could Shaikan be larger than Majnoon? For me, it would seem hard to believe that the Shaikan anticline alone could contain this much. But if there is spill and connectivity between Shaikan and Sheik Adi and Sariyah, as put forward as a POSSIBILITY in a previous post:
[...]

then my expection would be - why not more than 8 BBS.Why do I bring up this 'old' stuff again? Because it fits in with a post by Gavxfm at 08:43 this morning where he stated that:"I sent an email to GKP yesterday and asked them specifically where the OIP was and would it be announced on the 1st the answer was:We are currently evaluating the data and will announce an updated figure for oil in place in due course. Given the geology of the Triassic formations, it may require the results of 3D seismic."The only reason I can think of for needing the results of 3D seismic to update OIP is if that OIP occupies MORE THAN just the Shaikan anticline. Why? Because they had no problems in estimating OIP for the Triassic in Shaikan from their existing 2D seismic before they started drilling. What has changed apart from getting actual well data since then? Nothing else I can think of - other than perhaps a greater sense of perspective.OIP that is "so massive and beyond expectations and we can not give the figures" and "may require the results of 3D seismic".

I can wait. I will wait.BBBS

[swanrodin] 12/5/2021 14:25

CNN – Todd Kozel Interview.

Reporter: One company that is leveraging on the back of Iraq’s energy resources is Gulf Keystone. Established a decade ago, the independent firm ventured into Northern Iraq in 2007. This week, it announced, it had found additional oil, expected to be between 10 and 15 billion barrels. Investors are bullish on the company’s future and share price has sky-rocketed from 4p to a high of 103p, within the past year. I sat down with the Executive Chairman, Todd Kozel and asked him about the company’s newfound success.

Todd Kozel:What we have discovered is something that is an oil man’s dream, you know, you read about these things from 1900, 1920s, 1930s; at 3000m onshore, to find what is a 2 to 5 billion barrel oilfield now, which has the potential on Shaikan number 1, to get in the 10 to 15 billion range, it’s just unheard of… it’s exciting stuff. It has taken our Market Cap, in the last three months, from £45million to almost £600million, and we’ve only drilled our first well.

Reporter:It’s fascinating, because even in the London Market, they’re talking about the Gulf Keystone Effect, because of the run-up of the stock and then the momentum investors coming behind it. How do you manage expectations from what was truly a micro-cap stock into something now that is part of the common vernacular in terms of trading?

Todd Kozel:We’ve had to be careful drilling this well. This well has encountered oil since 30 days after we started drilling. We’ve had to take a position early on, that newsflow is announced when possible, just the basic facts, manage people’s expectations, keep the Markets informed, and don’t let the story run away with itself. We brought in… We even brought in third parties to do reserve estimates and engineering reports, at a very early stage, which is not customary normally within our business, because… not because we needed to know that information, we need to accurately translate that information to the investing public.

Reporter:There’;s a huge question, as you know. What is Kurdish oil? What is National Government oil for the government of Iraq? When you come to production, how are you going to manage the politics of what share goes to the National Government?

Todd Kozel:I do not see that there is a division of the view on who owns what oil. My view, and my understanding of the Kurdish position, is that this is Iraq’s oil and a percentage of the profits of the share of that oil, by agreement, will be sent to Kurdistan. Our oil, under Contract, will be sold by State Marketing and Baghdad; we shall receive our share under the Contract, the government of Kurdistan is happy to receive their share, the remaining shares are divided however the Central Government has their agreements, and so forth.

Reporter:You have a property in Algeria, you’ve got to development, in terms of natural gas, but you’re not going to stay in Algeria, you’re finding it too politically difficult?

Todd Kozel:As a small oil company, as any oil company, you high-grade your prospects, you know, where are my dollars best spent? Kurdistan, we have discovered just about 25million barrels of oil a day, for a $30million well. Our project in Algeria, or two projects combined in Algeria are 70million barrels to our interest. So for our shareholders money, we’re discovering a lot more oil, incurring a lot more value, in Kurdistan. So, therefore that’s where we need to focus.

Reporter:To actually produce this field then, you’re going to need a Capital Injection from a major oil company. You’re going to need about $120million over the next year.

Todd Kozel:We’re the most popular person at the dance right now.

Reporter:Meaning you’re getting a lot of attention?

Todd Kozel:Three months ago, six months ago, it was very difficult to get people talking about financing a company, not just Gulf Keystone, but any of the small-cap, mid-cap oil companies, exploration companies. We have all the attention we need, we’ve got our current shareholders, of which the management and the Board are an unusually large piece. Our Institutional shareholders are all very supportive and that’s probably where we’ll go to raise that Capital.

Reporter:You’re going to be an independent company in six months time?

Todd Kozel:Six months, YES! Definitely… erm! The amount of reserves we’ve got and what it’s going to take if we want to fast-track to full production from the four Licences and the potential from the Licences; it will be increasingly difficult to keep up with it financially, and with Human Resources, technology, engineering. It’s bigger than Gulf Keystone is now, but we’re growing into it quickly.

[broadford bay] 12/5/2021 14:24

Hi bigdog,

I see the clowns talking to themselves again..

Re "rock solid holders", the Financial Supervisory Authority FIN-FSA says:

"Which circumstances require a notification?
A notification is made whenever one’s proportion of holdings or votes in any listed company reaches, exceeds or falls below a disclosure threshold. The thresholds are 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, 30%, 50%, 2/3 and 90% of the number of voting rights or shares in a company."

Lansdown doesn't need to notify unless they drop below 15% or go above 20%.
Hoof Hoorneman doesn't need to notify unless they drop below 10% or go above 15%.
and so on, and so on, and so on.
With the right kit, even small waves can generate a lot of electricity.

They are trading the pants off it you mugs, regular 10% moves up and down will do very nicely. What is it they say - the trend is your friend?
Ride the wave but get off before it hits the rocks!

[bravedog] 12/5/2021 14:23

Ok, but as of May 7, there are around 1.8 mio more shares...

[guypender] 12/5/2021 14:14

The world still needs at least 1billion barrels every 2 weeks.

[guypender] 12/5/2021 14:13

EIA commentaryWe estimate that the world consumed 96.2 million barrels per day (b/d) of petroleum and liquid fuels in April, an increase of 15.8 million b/d from April 2020 but 4.0 million b/d less than April 2019 levels. We forecast that global consumption of petroleum and liquid fuels will average 97.7 million b/d for all of 2021, which is a 5.4 million b/d increase from 2020. We forecast that consumption of petroleum and liquid fuels will increase by 3.7 million b/d in 2022 to average 101.4 million b/d.

[habshan] 12/5/2021 13:29

Indeed Pensioner.

The top nine being unchanged from the previous notification so all rock solid. The only difference being that JPMorgan Chase have moved into the top ten at no.10 with 2.83% or just under 6 million shares thus replacing Brightsphere with their 2.52%.