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More St. Clair mineral rights hitting market (complete article from source)
Source: al.com, by RUSSELL HUBBARD
March 01, 2007
More acreage in energy-rich St. Clair County is up for sale, just as drilling companies scramble for more land in Alabama's booming natural-gas oasis.
A Texas-based timber company said Tuesday it plans to sell underlying mineral rights to 351,000 acres in Alabama and Georgia. The company didn't say how much of the land is in the new, 40-square-mile Big Canoe Creek gas field 45 miles northeast of Birmingham.
But Kenny Jastrow, chief executive of Austin-based Temple-Inland Corp., told investors on a conference call Tuesday there has been "a significant gas find in Northern Alabama" and that his company has "land in that area."
Natural-gas exploration companies have been quietly amping up in St. Clair County for about two years, offering landowners $500 per acre signing bonuses and an 18 percent share of eventual natural gas revenues.
But gas fever hit St. Clair County in earnest last month when one of the production companies asked the Oil and Gas Board for permission to expand drilling. Dominion Resources admitted that some of the gas shales run 7,000 feet thick - four times thicker than the shales in the nation's largest onshore gas field, in Texas. Most of the exploration is near Ashville, the St. Clair County seat with a population of 1,700 people.
Temple-Inland, a company with $5.5 billion of annual revenue and the fifth-largest timberland owner in the South, will probably get plenty of offers for its timberland and the mineral rights. The company earned $35 million from mineral rights in other states last year, said Mark Weintraub, a Wall Street analyst for Buckingham Research who follows the company's fortunes.
"It's really early right now," Weintraub said of the Ashville area's potential. "But mineral rights in general can be extremely valuable."
There are 16 active or permitted wells in St. Clair, according to the most recent Oil and Gas Board records. Virginia-based Dominion Resources operates 14 of them and Birmingham-based Energen Corp. has two.
Energen, which explores for energy throughout the South and Southwest, said last year it was exploring in Alabama, but had declined to say where. An Energen representative confirmed at an Oil and Gas Board hearing this month the company has been active in St. Clair County.
Geologists say the underlying formation containing the natural gas is much larger than the St. Clair County portion, and that it might run south of Birmingham and into northern Georgia. Some have compared its potential to the legendary Barnett Field, which covers 5,000 square miles in Texas.
Click here for complete article from al.com
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