First Calgary Petroleum - the gas/oil reserve giant

Excellent recent snippet.....

Vol. 9, No. 51 Week of December 19, 2004

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Oil Patch Insider

First Calgary can’t get no respect; Sempra working on Alaska LNG project




First Calgary Petroleums announced a natural gas find in Algeria on Dec. 8 and got shunted to the inside pages of Canada’s business sections.

The same day Shell Canada announced a gas discovery in west-central Alberta and, in the words of one Canadian newspaper columnist, it was “as if the company had found an image of Jesus on a rock structure 5,000 meters below the surface.”

First Calgary, once a penny stock and now trading at over C$18 a share, said the flow rate from its well in Algeria was 73,000 million cubic feet per day, compared with 30 million from Shell’s discovery.

It also adds momentum to First Calgary’s corporate strategic review that is widely expected to end in a takeover of the Calgary-based company, which now has a market value of C$3.3 billion based on a string of successes in Algeria.

The Financial Times newspaper in London floated the latest rumor Dec. 6 when it reported that Statoil, Norway’s largest oil company, was stalking First Calgary as its primary quarry to expand its reach into North Africa and the Middle East.

First Calgary has indicated that a sale is necessary to develop its Algerian proven, probable and possible reserves that now tally about 7 trillion cubic feet. A reserves update is expected later this month.

Its Algerian discoveries have tested at cumulative flow rates of almost 600 million cubic feet per day of gas and 40,000 barrels per day of oil — the sort of numbers Shell Canada or any other Canadian major would happily settle for.