For Investors Only: OAS

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what's a map like this worth?

This is a rather disjointed note. Again, too many things going on in the Bakken to take time to sort all this out, so just a bunch of data points for investors to consider.

I have followed Oasis ever since it acquired Fidelity's acreage in the Cottonwood field (Bakken, North Dakota, USA) a year or so ago (I now forget when that occurred, but it surprised me when I heard about it).

I don't hold any OAS, but it's high on my list.

The company was founded in 2007; it's headquartered in Houston, and all its holdings (as far as I can tell) are in the North Dakota and the Montana Bakken, and it appears their acreage is in some of the best Bakken. Their strategic vision, it appears, has been to aggressively acquire acreage, and worry about drilling second. Now that they have the acreage, they are drilling. Including a permit for their first two-well pad, to the best of my knowledge, which they got today.

The map linked above shows the three prospects of Oasis: West Williston, East Nesson, and the Sanish. These are very, very good areas in the Bakken.

The Sanish, of course, is known to be one of the best, if not the best, area in the Bakken. It is "owned" by Whiting and sits just west of the Parshall oil field, "owned" by EOG.

West Williston has turned out to be surprisingly good and may be even better going forward, if that's possible, but it may take increased fracturing stages/well.

The East Nesson is good the farther south one goes toward the Sanish, but so far I have not been impressed with the East Nesson further north. This includes the Cottonwood field which has been mediocre, at least in my eyes. But if it's just a matter of improved drilling techniques/increased fracturing stages, maybe the Cottonwood will be more impressive. Or sold for a profit to buy better acreage elsewhere.

OAS has an excellent website, http://oasispetroleum.com/.

At the end of August, OAS was selling for $16.50. Today, it hit a 52-week high of $19.55 and dropped back slightly.

By my calculations, OAS controls 309,000 net acres, some with production. Compare this acreage with that of other Bakken drillers. At $5,000/acre, that's $1.545 billion.

The market cap for OAS is $1.8 billion with no debt, according to Yahoo!Financials.  BEXP, which everyone has heard about, has a market cap of $2.2 billion with $160 million in debt.

On the active drilling list, OAS has five rigs. BEXP has six drilling rigs and plans to go to eight. (The numbers change on the active drilling rig list but those are the numbers this evening.)

*****

Disclaimer

1. I am inappropriately exuberant about the Bakken.
2. I have no formal financial training.
3. I have no background in the oil industry other than what I learn on my own.
4. This is not a recommendation to buy shares in OAS. It is simply the kind of "idle chatter" one might hear over coffee at the Economart in Williston.