OCR Text |
Show Syntana-Utah formed to produce oil shale Synthetic Oil Corp., headquartered in Oklahoma City, and Quintana Minerals Corp., headquartered in Houston, have formed a joint venture to aggressively pursue production of oil from shale in Uintah County. The newly formed company "will be Syntana-Utah, the state's Land Board members were told Tuesday of last week by Wayne E. Shannon, executive vice president of Synthetic Oil and Bob Donegan, vice president of Quintana Minerals. The new company has acquired 13 leases comprising 8,000 acres in the proposed White River Dam-Bonanza area. "The place is right for us Utah shale development over Colorado shale development and the market is right," Shannon proclaimed. Synthetic Oil Corp., has as its primary business objective the development of a supply position in refinable crude produced from oil shale resources in the Western United States. Quintana Minerals is intent on the exploration for the production of mineral values. It has a major operations office in Tuscon. "This joint venture puts us in strong resource and technology positions to pursue an expanded scope of oil shale resource development and production activities," Shannon said. The company is prepared to spend $5 million during the initial phase of expanded ex-panded activity. About $250,000 will be expended in the immediate future for core drilling at designated sites to try to determine the depths and nature of the deposits. The Syntana-Utah commercialization com-mercialization project team also includes in-cludes Davy McKee Corp., Cleveland; American Gilsonite Co., Salt Lake City ; VTN, Irvine, Calif.; C.K. Geoenergy Corp., Las Vegas; Cullen Center Inc., Houston; Merrill Lynch & Co., New York and Morgan Guaranty Trust Co., New York. Shannon expects the bottom line investment to be between $250 and $300 million. The company hopes to attract participation of the private sector financial community and federal monies. In other action, the Land Board provided for additional four leases involving about 1,000 acres, for Asphalt Ridge (Uintah County) tar sands development presently under way by Sohio Shale Oil Co. The company already had 8,300 acres of which 3,600 is involved in a cooperative development program. Rees C. Madsen, manager of shale and tar sands development for Sohio, told the Land Board that the additional acreage was pertinent to final commercial com-mercial development plans. Madsen also presented an update on current activities that indicate the company is on target in meeting 20,000 barrel-per-day production from tar sands by 1989. |