CNRL to monetise 240,000 acres of Montaignais land in the Graham Kobes area

Canadian Natural Resources, the second largest natural gas producer in Canada, has begun to monetise approximately 240,000 net acres about 375 sections in the Montagnais land base, in the Graham Kobes area of northeastern B.C.
“Under the process, Canadian Natural will consider either outright sale of lands or joint venture partner with LNG expertise to jointly develop the lands,” Steve W. Laut, president Canadian Natural Resources said at the second-quarter press conference August 8th, 2013. “If this process meets our internal targets and the transaction is completed, Canadian Natural will continue to have one of the largest undeveloped Montagnais land bases in Canada, with lands contained in two major areas in Saskatchewan and Northwest Alberta. The process is well underway, with the data room opening in the middle of the month.”
On a conference call with analysts, Canadian Natural president Steve Laut acknowledged that the company has “not been keen” on joint ventures historically.
“We believe having a high degree of control of our capital allocation allows us to maximise value. We also believe the efforts of our strong team should be directed to creating value for our shareholders, not working interest partners. That is still the case,” he said. “However, in this situation, when we look at the size of our Montney land base and balancing our capital allocation going forward, combined with the strong demand that we see for this type of high quality asset, plus the fact that Graham Kobes is somewhat removed from our core Montney asset base, it is prudent to monetise a portion of our Montney asset base at this time.”
Laut gave an update on the Primrose clean up; “we’re committed to ensuring the Primrose clean up and reclamation work is done right. We’ll minimise the impact with the environment, and were taking proactive measures to prevent this type of incident in the future. Our cleanup operations are going well, and we recovered a substantial amount of oil that seeped to the surface. The impacted area has been reduced by 35 per cent. Our teams are doing a great job cleaning up the location in a manner that minimises additional environmental damage and are doing it safely… The bitumen emulsion will continue to seep out at declining rates for a period of time. At this point in time we estimate seepage from all four locations is less than 20 barrels a day.”
The oil is collected daily and there is very little or no environmental damage. Canadian Natural is confident that the cause of the bitumen emulsion seepage is due to wellbore mechanical failures in the vicinity of the impacted locations “and we have a pretty good idea of the leaking wellbores,” Laut said.

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