STOCK WATCH:
JACKPOT! Davy Jones strike points to bonanza on U.S. Gulf shelf
U.S. independent producer McMoRan Exploration Co. believes it has confirmed through a major discovery what much larger, better financed explorers have suspected and salivated over for years -- the presence of an extremely deep, massive and potentially lucrative natural gas play thought to underlie a significant portion of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico’s Outer Continental Shelf.
In characterizing the recently disclosed Davy Jones discovery, McMoRan Co-Chairman James “Jim Bob” Moffett declared in a Jan. 11 conference call with financial analysts: “The whole landscape of the subsurface geology of the shelf is being reshaped.”
Davy Jones itself, which could prove to be the largest gas discovery on the shelf in decades, appears to be but a small slice of a very big pie, known as the Wilcox sands.
Moreover, on McMoRan’s 150,000-acre “ultra-deep” shelf position alone, the company said it has a dozen more drill-ready prospects based on seismic studies and initial data recovered from Davy Jones and an earlier McMoRan ultra-deep well, Blackbeard. McMoRan now plans to deepen the Blackbeard discovery well thousands of feet into the Wilcox, in light of successful drilling at Davy Jones, located in just 20 feet of water on South Marsh Island Block 230.
To keep McMoRan’s ambitious exploration and development programs on track, the company is considering adding a third jack-up rig to its current drilling fleet, to join the Rowan Mississippi and the Ralph Coffman. McMoRan believes that the prospects on its ultra-deep acreage contain multiple trillions of cubic feet of reserve potential. A discovery with at least 1 trillion cubic feet of confirmed reserves is generally considered to be a world-class field.
