King Appoints Harris as Chairman, Prepares for Huge Seismic JV

King Resources

King Resources, Inc. reported that the appointment of Norris R. Harris as Chairman of King Resources. Mr. Harris replaces James Fajack who will remain on board as Vice Chairman and CFO.

King owns approximately 170,000 miles of 2-D seismic from Florida to far south Texas. This data was acquired by King in 2001 for $6.5 million. Two independent appraisals give the data a value of over $60 million.

The company has an arrangement with a private entity which will fund the digitizing of the data and the cost of reviewing all of the data on digital workstations. King expects this work to locate numerous exploratory and development opportunities in the prolific Gulf Coast area where today's technology allows the geophysicist to learn much more from data which was gathered and processed even five years ago. This data was gathered during a thirty year period from the mid-sixties to the mid-nineties.

In return for funding this project, the private entity will have the right to develop leads which the entity generates. King will have the right to participate directly or receive an overriding royalty or carried working interest in every well and acquisition generated. It is estimated that this project will be ongoing, and the first phase will require five years of time and several million dollars. The obvious prospects will be located in a short period of time; the more complicated prospects will take longer.

A team of experts with long experience in seismic and geological interpretation is being assembled for this venture. This team will be guided by Mr. Harris who first introduced the oil & gas industry to true amplitude and broad bandpass recording in the late 1960s over the violent objection of his superiors and at the time, most of his industry peers. This technology led to the direct detection of hydrocarbons with seismic data which was widely considered impossible at the time, but is routinely used today.

This will not be the first time Mr. Harris has led a study of this scope, having once supervised a study of over 300,000 miles of data, from the Sea of Japan to the Gulf of Thailand. Mr. Harris was also responsible for geophysics during the early phase of exploration in the UK waters of the North Sea and offshore Nigeria, where over two billion barrels of oil was found based upon his personal seismic interpretation.

King and the group which is funding this project expect this work to add considerable value to the data base and to lead to the acquisition of more data through industry exchanges.


Most Popular Articles