Ask Alan Booth what it takes to make a successful North Sea oil and gas exploration company and he’ll tell you about drilling wells and making your own luck. For the chief executive of EnCore Oil (LON:EO.), having done it all before means he and his team have nothing to prove but a great deal to gain just by sticking to a tried and tested strategy - discovery, development and finding ways of cashing in on North Sea fields overlooked by larger players in the past.
EnCore is among a large number of cohorts in the North Sea looking to do a similar thing but what is notable about Booth is his focus on why they are doing it - everything comes down to shareholder value. With EnCore now enjoying the momentum that can only come with stakes in two highly prospective projects, it now wants to repeat its success with a new exploration company scheduled to float before the summer. EnCore will split off its exploration portfolio into a new AIM quoted company called XEO Exploration. It will take with it assets including interests in Hoylake, Tudor Rose, Buffalo, Spaniards and Merrow licences and leave behind EnCore’s two main development priorities at Catcher and Cladhan. The move sets the scene for Booth and his team to raise funding for an all-new exploration programme and leave EnCore to channel its resources into finishing off the development of Catcher and Cladhan.
Booth, together with CFO Eugene Whyms and exploration director Graham Doré, have got form for discovering oil fields in the North Sea. Back in 2001 they were behind the discovery and development of the Buzzard field while at EnCana UK, a company that went on to be sold to Nexen Petroleum for £2.1bn. With an estimated 700 million barrels of recoverable reserves, Buzzard was the largest North Sea field discovered for 25 years.
For those new to the EnCore story, Booth and his team brought the company to AIM in March 2006 with a plan to continue looking for fields that had been overlooked by larger North Sea players. Since then, it has been involved in numerous exploration and appraisal projects around the UK Continental Shelf. In June 2009 it pocketed £42 million from the sale of its 15% stake in the large pre-development Breagh gas discovery project to RWE Dea. Nine months later it sold its stake…
