OCR Text |
Show Paraho plant inches toward startup date Paraho Development Corporation announced Tuesday that it has signed an oil shale land agreement with Gulf Oil Corporation. This is another in a series of agreements with various parties designed to blockup more than 5.500 acres of oil shale resources around the Paraho-Ute project site in southeastern Uintah County. Paraho-Ute is a proposed commercial commer-cial size shale oil plant on which construction con-struction will begin as soon as financing financ-ing is arranged. The current land agreement is the second with Gulf Oil and Frederick H. Larson. Each agreement coveres five unpatented mining claims in Uintah County, north of the White River. The current agreement gives Paraho a lease with an option to purchase pur-chase unpatented mining claims within the project site. It brings the total GulfLarsen acreage dedicated to Paraho to 1,321 acres estimated by Paraho to contain 168 million barrels oil in place. In return for the options on the acreage, GulfLarson has received technical data and the right to production produc-tion royalties. At Paraho's request, all of the GulfLarsen acreage has been selected in the state of Utah as land it has the right to receive from the federal government in lieu of lands that Utah did not receive when it became a state. When the state acquires ac-quires the lands, the unpatented mining min-ing claims will be deeded to the state of Utah in return for state of Utah oil shale leases assigned to Paraho. The signing of the oil shale land agreement represents the third recent major milestone for the Paraho-Ute Shale Oil Project. On May 10 Paraho announced that four companies, Kellogg Rust Synfuels, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Wheelabrator-Fraye, Wheelabrator-Fraye, Inc.; Raymond Kaiser Engineers, Inc.; Sohio Shale Oil Company, Com-pany, a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company (Ohio); and Texas Easter Synfuels, Inc., a subsidiary of Texas Eastern Corporation, had joined Paraho in expressing conditional commitments com-mitments to take an equity position in the project. Also on March 24, Paraho was advised by the U.S. Synthetic Fuels Corporation that it passed the maturity tests under the corporation guidelines and moved into negotiations for a loan guarantee and price guarantee, coupled with the final strength review. |