What To Watch For in The Enercom Conference This Week -- Part I -- Bakken, North Dakota, USA

Enercom Conference 

Part I

Part II: Agenda Highlights

Part III

Part IV

Part V

If I remember correctly, the Enercom Conference is, without question, the conference for those interested in the Bakken. It is being held this week in Denver, Colorado.

For those who cannot attend, the presenters will place their presentations on the web following their oral presentation. (Man, that's an awful sentence.)

It is so important, so relevant, so interesting that I have moved the link for this conference to the top of the sidebar at the right for easy reference.

This is what I will be looking for in the presentations of the oil exploration and production companies:

• How much the Bakken represents vs the company's total worldwide acreage?
• Whether the oil company has increased its Bakken acreage? Bakken acreage is expensive, so if they've increased Eagle Ford acreage, that might be a trade-off. The Niobrara, in 2011, is not a trade-off for the Bakken in 2011. Companies not increasing Bakken acreage concern me.
• Whether the company has made any new strategic decisions? Example: Oasis starting a new company, Oasis Wells Services. Are companies thinking outside the box?
• Ratio of rigs to dedicated frack teams.
• Ratio of rigs to acreage.
• Comments on infrastructure initiatives. If only bringing oil to surface and not getting it to pipeline or CBR facility, that's a problem in my mind
• Whether the company highlights any new technology? Fracking changes, particularly, combined with monitoring of microseismic arrays (which I don't fully understand)
• Uniqueness of business models. I've talked about this before. The CLR business model is substantially different than the business model of WLL, for example. BEXP is different than both of those. NOG and VOG are certainly different.

More to follow in these areas as presentations start to be posted.

I won't follow the nitty-gritty of the financial slides, for reasons I've posted numerous time.

I might try to sort out finding and production costs. Red flags will be trends going the wrong way within a company, but comparing costs between companies is fraught with difficulty. They may count things the same way (SEC rules) but they can present them differently and rely on footnotes to further explain them.