While on the other side of the world, Lingo said comparing the new project to better understood assets in the Cooper Basin was a good yardstick for investors to get their head around the opportunity Elk had secured for a modest sum.

 

He said that in order to ensure potential investors can grasp the "profitability, materiality and longevity of the business Elk is building" it was a useful exercise to compare the assets to those they may be familiar with.

 

The Lost Cabin facility is a 310 million cubic feet per day plant, about the same size as the Moomba Gas Plant in South Australia, and Lingo said comparing Lost Cabin and the Madden gas field to owning a slice of Cooper Basin infrastructure would help give potential investors a better sense of the materiality in Elk's portfolio, and its plans to become a mid-tier oil and gas producer.

 

"With the exception of a few long-term investors in Elk there is very little familiarity with a lot of the key assets, infrastructure and commercial relationships critical to successfully building a business focussed on CO2 enhanced oil recovery in the US Northern Rockies CO2 EOR production fairway," he said.

 

"So we go to considerable lengths to make sure existing and potential investors have a clear understanding of each of these elements.

 

"When you look at the Madden and CO2 field and the Lost Cabin gas plant you are looking at the 33rd biggest gas field in the US, as ranked by the US Energy Information Administration, and the second biggest gas field in Wyoming.

 

"[Given] Wyoming is the fourth biggest gas producer in the US, in terms of the US this is a very material oil and gas production asset," he said.

 

Lingo said the purchase of a 14% stake from Freeport-McMoRan means Elk has become a significant owner in a "very material, low risk and long-term profitable production asset", one that can help underpin its plans to become a significant EOR oil producer in the US.

 

Madden is also Wyoming's second largest supplier of CO2, and a source of CO2 is critical to Elk's long-term ambitions to build its EOR business, skilling up and eventually exporting those same skills into the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia.

 

The University of Wyoming estimates that another four billion barrels of oil is recoverable in Wyoming alone through the application of CO2 EOR.

 

The company is paying just the $US17.5 million ($A22.9 million) for the assets from Freeport, which is quitting oil and gas, but the assets should generate free cashflow of $7 million this year, even after the modest costs required to keep the operation ticking over.

 

There is shallow gas upside in the Madden field that operator ConocoPhillips has identified, although there is no immediate appetite or requirement to develop that potential, Lingo explained.

 

Discussions with Elk's new partners, ConocoPhillips and Moncrief Oil & Gas had been good, and they appear to be aligned on the overall profitability of the Madden operation, he said.

 

"Incremental projects such as these present a big upside for the Madden operation," he said.

 

"The operator evaluates all of these opportunities on an annual basis including evaluation of each well in the field for its behind pipe resource and production potential, as well as how to increase production and lower operating costs and increase profitability through surface production and processing facility debottlenecking and optimisation." 

 

Most of the upside opportunities fall within three categories: either recompleting the existing wells to access unproduced zones; infill drilling; and debottlenecking the existing gas gathering system with new completions and additional compression.

 

In the immediate future the focus on the partners is keeping the plant working with healthy profit margins, although Lost Cabin is only running at about 60% of its total capacity, and there is a strong demand for gas sourced in Wyoming for states between energy-hungry California to Ohio, so growth opportunities can be tapped as the market demands.

 

"The demand in gas out of Wyoming is such that our gas production from Madden only experiences about an 8% locational discount to the Henry Hub gas price and as the market strengthens this discount reduces dramatically to less than half that amount," Lingo said. 

 

Beyond Madden and Lost Cabin, Elk's EOR focus continues capacity building.

 

Elk has identified a number of maturing oil fields suitable for CO2 EOR in close proximity to Lost Cabin and the CO2 pipeline network that are of similar size and scale as the Grieve, some of which Elk's EOR partner, Denbury Resources has an interest in already,

 

Lingo said Elk would be looking to replicate the success at Grieve, which is still to produce first oil, using the relationship the company has built with Denbury, leveraging the CO2 supplies from Lost Cabin in Wyoming and Montana. 

 

There are a number of CO2 expansion prospects including the extension of the Greencore CO2 pipeline up to the big Cedar Creek Anticline fields owned by Denbury and into northwest Colorado where Chevron Corporation operates the large Rangely CO2 EOR project. 

 

Lingo told Energy News that the company was working to bed down Grieve and Madden, while looking at a pipeline of additional opportunities.

 

"Unlike many of the parts of the Australian oil and gas provinces where a good opportunity may come around once every 2-3 years in the Northern Rockies production fairway we are seeing opportunities emerge every almost on a quarterly basis," Lingo said.

 

"The market is much more active and companies are much more willing to optimise their asset holdings so ultimately good production and development assets like the Madden gas field can find their way onto the right hands that can make the most value out of them."

 

Elk shares last traded at 6.9 cents per share.