Another company enjoying insider buying is Alex Guidi's New Zealand-focused TAG Oil Ltd.
(TAO), up a cent to 83 cents on 21,000 shares. It too has a connection
to the Lundins: Henrik Lundin, Lukas Lundin's cousin, became chief
operating officer on June 27. He promptly bought 17,000 shares on June
29, boosting his holdings to 27,000 of TAG's 62 million shares. From
June 16 to July 25, CEO Toby Pierce bought 68,000 shares, boosting his
holdings to 203,700. The above-mentioned Mr. Guidi, founder and
chairman, has bought 192,500 shares in the last 16 days, including
25,000 yesterday. All seem optimistic about the coming activities in New
Zealand's Taranaki basin. TAG's three producing fields there are called
Cheal, Greater Cheal and Sidewinder, and according to SEDAR, only half
of the wells at those fields were on production as of Aug. 15; the rest
were shut in for workovers or recompletion evaluations. TAG said earlier
this year that it had identified over 50 "potential optimization
opportunities" to boost production and would focus this year on 11. Some
have now been finished; TAG said earlier this month that it conducted
workovers on three wells and saw a total production boost of 90 barrels a
day. It also tested 254 barrels a day of light oil and condensates from
a bypassed oil interval -- one that had not produced before and did not
have any reserves booked -- in an existing well at Sidewinder. TAG says
on its website that it is now assessing other bypassed opportunities at
Sidewinder, and will also drill one exploration well there in its
fiscal fourth quarter. The big project in the near term is the start-up
of a waterflood program in the greater Cheal area. TAG has high hopes
for this program given that it already waterflooded one well, Cheal-A3X,
and watched production climb to 167 barrels a day in early 2014 from
just 23 barrels a day in mid-2010. (The well's production started to
decline after early 2014, but at a low rate of just 1.5 per cent a
month.)
Another Taranaki project, and a relatively new one for
TAG, is the past-producing Puka permit, in which the company acquired a
70-per-cent interest in June. MEO Australia Ltd. holds the remaining 30
per cent. Yesterday, MEO held an investor presentation at which it
talked up a "potential high-impact wildcat oil opportunity" at Puka's
Pukatea prospect. (TAG's investors would know it as the Shannon
prospect.) This lies below the Puka field and is "analogous to [the]
nearby Waihapa oil field," which has produced over 23 million barrels to
date, said MEO. It pegged the best estimate of Pukatea's prospective
resources at 5.3 million barrels. Meanwhile, the overlying Puka pool was
enabling two wells to produce about 110 barrels a day before the wells
were shut in last year because of mechanical problems and low oil
prices. MEO said that a workover could be completed on one of the wells
in order to resume production, and that further drilling could be done
from the existing production pad. It added that drilling plans would be
determined with TAG next quarter. The actual drilling, of course, is not
likely to take place for a while yet; MEO previously forecast that the
first well (which could quite possibly be the above-described
"high-impact" exploration well) would not be spudded until October of
next year.