OCR Text |
Show Company Tells Of Gas, Oil Lease Acquisition Representatives of Northwest Exploration Company met with area residents at Panguitch City Room to explain the reason for the company's presence in the area. Panguitch Chamber of Commerce sponsored the informative meeting in which NEC informed residents and landowners about the company's offer to lease for oil and gas in the Panguitch area. Gordon Swenson, land representative for Allen N. Henderson law firm in Salt Lake City, attorneys for Northwest Exploration Company, summarized the company's leasing program. He said that the company is a subsidiary of Northwest Energy Company located in Salt Lake City and that NEC itself is headquartered in Denver. He noted that in their first year of operation they were 39-percent successful in exploratory drilling as compared to 10-percent success industry wide. Under terms of the leases offered to Panguitch residents, drilling will stop within 200 feet of any city lot and that leasing of the city properties is necessary to meet federal acreage standards. He indicated that NEC has received approximately 150 to 200 signed leases back from those mailed out to Panguitch area residents Swenson said that the leasees offered contain only the leasing of rights but not the guarantee to drill. NEC currently has an exploratory well two and one-half miles south of Panguitch on BLM land. In response to a question regarding leases currently in effect with Shell Oil Company by Panguitch landowners, Swenson replied that NEC is gambling that Shell will not drill by the June deadline and thus NEC will then be in a position to confirm their leases with area landowners. NEC claims that it has operated openly in its attempts to acquire leases of some of the same land that Shell is currently leasing and does not see any thing illegal about its approach. When asked if he thought the oil and gas were there, Swenson replied that obviously they think it is or they could not justify spending one and one-half million dollars to drill for it. Northwest Energy Company, the parent company of Northwest Exploration Company, has assets of more than $750-million and through its subsidiaries is involved in interstate natural gas transmission and storage, oil and gas exploration and development in the western United States, underground coal mining in Colorado and importing of large volumes of natural gas from Canada. |