It came as little surprise to market-watchers earlier this year when Gulfsands Petroleum (LON:GPX) found itself at the centre of a potential bid approach. The AIM listed oil and gas group has enjoyed a string of successes at its flagship projects in Syria and is now sparking more interest with prospective drilling work in Tunisia as well as making progress on a deal over a major gas play in Iraq. For corporate development director, Kenneth Judge, while the March takeover talks failed to offer anything close to a deal, the prospects for Gulfsands remain hugely exciting.
Judge played a role in earlier Gulfsands asset deals and was brought in as a director in October 2006, 18 months after the company floated in London. Since then, the company has shifted its focus away from exploration and production in the US Gulf of Mexico in order to pursue its original strategy of developing projects in the Middle East and North Africa. He spoke to Stockopedia about the company’s production plans in Syria and his expectations for the company as deals and project work in Tunisia and Iraq gather momentum.
Gulfsands kicked off production from the Khurbet East field in mid 2008 and is now producing from the Yousefieh field as well. What have been the challenges in building up your production profile?
Production in Syria now is averaging over 20,000 barrels a day, which is around 2,000 barrels a day ahead of our original guidance. Most of that upside has come from Yousefieh itself and some smart footwork to increase the capacity of our early production facility, where the original nameplate capacity was only 18,000 barrels a day. Obviously, as we are producing over 20,000 barrels a day, we must have come up with some inventive solutions to get past that, which is what we have done.
Khurbet East and Yousefieh are only 3km apart, so we are able to transport the oil from the facility at Yousefieh across to the larger facilities at Khurbet East and use the transport and storage facilities there to handle the higher volumes of oil from combining production from both fields. The current oil transport system involves a trucking operation which constrains our ability to move production even higher because we’re very busy already, running about 85 trucks per day on a dedicated highway. We will finish construction of a pipeline…
