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American Right of Way Academy’s CEO, Don Valden says “We are offering two Oil & Gas Training Workshops in order to prepare individuals to become new Right of Way and Land Title Agents to serve the various oil and gas companies drilling in the Eagle Ford Shale play counties, between San Antonio and Corpus Christie, Texas…We have trained hundreds of men and women that have become successful in the Barnett Shale, the Haynesville Shale and the Eagle Ford Shale plays for over six years.”

With the increased need for alternative energy, right of way would be the next opportunity for an Exciting and Lucrative career in the Oil & Gas Shale Plays.

There continues to be a need for trained Right of Way and Land Title agents to assist with acquiring surface right of way for pipelines to carry natural gas and crude oil from individual well sites to existing pipeline infrastructure located and Southeast of San Antonio, Texas. It is anticipated the development of the Eagle Ford Shale will continue for the next twenty to thirty years.

Because of these high demands from the consumer the oil & gas companies are currently drilling for oil and gas near San Antonio, Texas. American Right of Way Academy will hold two more exciting Eagle Ford Shale Training Workshops on Saturday, September 22nd, 2012 at the Crowne Plaza San Antonio Airport Hotel. These Workshops are titled Right of Way Acquisitions Training and Land Title Research Training.

According to local professionals, Right of Way agents and Title agents working in the Energy Industry typically earn between $50,000 and $150,000 annually depending upon experience and personal initiative.

American Right of Way Academy’s P.R. Director, Rebecca Castro says, “Oil & Gas companies depend on a Professional Training Academy such as; ARWA to provide the education by teaching them the art of Right of Way, Negotiations and Land Title Research, where the shale plays are in current demand..Our workshops provide a warm and friendly atmosphere for learning with an interactive environment according to the individuals who have one or more of our offered workshops.”

These classes will be taught by Don Valden, oil & gas industry expert and title expert Charlie Finley on Saturday, September 22nd, 2012 from 8:30am to 12:30pm & 1:30pm to 5:30pm at the Crown Plaza San Antonio Airport Hotel and will provide training in the areas of Pipeline Right of Way Easement Acquisitions, Land Owner Negotiations, Real Estate Evaluation, Plats & Engineering, Route Selections, Pipeline Construction as well as Title Research, Title Runs Sheets, Plat & Deed Records. People who successfully complete the Training Program will receive a Certificate of Completion.

Limited Seating. For more information, call 1-855-737-ARWA or go to the website.

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Apache Corporation (NYSE, Nasdaq: APA) announced it was the high bidder on 90 shelf and deep water blocks in the Central Gulf of Mexico offshore lease sale held today by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) in New Orleans.

Of the 56 companies submitting bids for Gulf of Mexico acreage, Apache Corp. was ranked No. 1 overall for its 61 high bids on the shelf, while Apache Deepwater LLC, the company’s deep water arm, was ranked No. 4 overall with 29 high bids.

The sum of the combined high bids was nearly $96 million gross.

“We’re excited about these blocks and our expanding presence in the Gulf of Mexico,” said G. Steven Farris, Apache chairman and chief executive officer. “The Gulf of Mexico is integral to Apache’s long-term growth. The shelf provides some of the best margins, highest returns and most free cash flow, and the deep water has some of the best exploration potential of any region in our global portfolio.”

Bidding on acreage in the shelf was focused on areas where Apache is acquiring proprietary seismic data, along with moderate to deep exploration prospects based on recently acquired and reprocessed seismic data. Successful deep water bids were focused on Pliocene and Miocene trends where Apache has acquired a significant seismic data base. Deep water bid partners included Stone Energy, Samson, Noble, Repsol, Nexen and Ecopetrol.

“This was a very robust lease sale with premium acreage,” said Jon Jeppesen, executive vice president of Apache’s Gulf of Mexico regions. “These blocks strengthen our position on the shelf and in the deep water. In both areas, Apache has the fiscal wherewithal, technical prowess and experience to capture the value of these opportunities.”

The shelf and deep water Gulf of Mexico currently represents 15.5 percent of Apache’s overall daily production.

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The federal government generated $1.74 billion Wednesday in high bids on oil-and-gas leases for 454 central Gulf of Mexico tracts, including 43 winning bids from BP.

The lease sale in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans was the largest Gulf lease sale since the 2010 BP oil rig explosion that killed 11 men and resulted in a three-month discharge of 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf and along Louisiana’s coast.

Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar said in a conference call after the lease sale that the event was the Gulf’s fourth-largest lease sale ever and included the single-largest winning bid in the Gulf in more than three decades.

The $157 million record bid was from Statoil, of Norway, for a tract in the central Gulf’s Mississippi Canyon that is south of Louisiana’s coastline, he said.

“This is a huge number relative of anything we’ve ever seen,” Salazar said of the lease sale.

The overall sale included nearly 600 bids from 48 companies on 454 tracts for deepwater drilling in the Gulf’s Outer Continental Shelf. Nearly 40 million total acres were put up for lease.

“What it does show is the Gulf is back,” Salazar said, adding that he participated in a flyover of the Gulf. “I saw no remnants of the oil and gas, which was so prevalent,” he said.

Salazar insisted that the lessons of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster not be forgotten. He also toured Louisiana’s Breton National Wildlife Refuge and Delta National Wildlife Refuge and he touted the restoration of 1,200 acres of marshland thus far and the need for much more.

But Salazar and his boss, President Barack Obama, also are taking jabs for the lease sale this week from both the political right and left.

Several conservation groups — Oceana, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity — are suing the federal government in an effort to block the completion of the leases.

The government “fails to adequately consider the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon spill; does not incorporate new analyses of the risks posed by offshore drilling, particularly in deep water; fails to include information essential to a reasoned choice among alternatives and improperly deems missing information nonessential; and fails to assess the environmental impacts of the action using a post-Deepwater Horizon baseline for species and habitats in the Gulf despite the fact that this lease sale covers the precise area where species and habitats suffered the most damage from the Deepwater Horizon incident,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed Monday in federal court.

On the other hand, U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., criticized the Obama administration for not doing enough in moving forward with domestic oil-and-gas production.

“I certainly hope our efforts to knock some sense into the administration about the critical nature of energy production in the Gulf of Mexico are starting to pay off,” Vitter said in a news release. “But until we see a positive trend with lease sales and issuing drilling permits, no one should be remotely convinced that Washington’s off-course energy policy is on the right track. The administration has restricted far more resources than they’ve made available, so while holding a lease sale is a good common-sense act, opening up more of the outer continental shelf and getting permitting back to normal rates also needs to be their focus.”

Vitter also noted that other lease sales were either delayed or canceled in the aftermath of the BP oil leak.

Salazar, however, called the Gulf of Mexico the nation’s “crown jewel” for oil-and-gas production as part of the president’s “all-of-the-above” energy strategy. The Gulf represents roughly one-third of the nation’s domestic oil-and-gas production, Salazar said, and total domestic production is the highest in eight years.

Wednesday’s lease sale was the second one held since the BP oil leak. In December, a much smaller lease sale in the less-developed western part of the Gulf generated nearly $340 million.

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Federal officials will unseal nearly 600 secret bids for offshore oil and gas leases on Wednesday, during the first auction of drilling rights in the central Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Industry officials are expecting a robust sale driven by pent-up demand for the acreage, big central Gulf discoveries recently and high oil prices earlier this year.

“You see a lot of companies who believe that the offshore Gulf of Mexico is going to be in the future a strong investment area in terms of the ability to develop and the availability of resources,” said Erik Milito, the American Petroleum Institute’s upstream director. “You’ve seen a lot of announcements and discussion about rigs coming into the Gulf.”

National Ocean Industries Association President Randall Luthi said uncertainty about the next sale of leases in the region also could spur some bidding. He predicted “pent-up demand and interest in leases.”

“If you consider a few big discoveries in the central Gulf over the past few years, such as Chevron’s Hadrian discovery and BP’s Tibor and Kaskida discoveries in deepwater and McMoran’s Davey Jones discovery in shallow water, there may be heavy interest in both deep-water and shallow-water blocks,” Luthi predicted.

During the auction, which kicks off at 9 a.m. at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Management will open 593 offers from 48 companies bidding on 454 tracts in the Gulf.

The acreage on the auction block includes areas ranging from three to 230 miles offshore, with water depths up to roughly 11,115 feet. Some of the tracts up for grabs are located near the site of the failed BP well that blew out in 2010, triggering a lethal explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and the nation’s worst oil spill.

The last central Gulf sale took place just a month before that disaster and brought in $949.3 million in high bids.

The Obama administration postponed a planned 2011 central Gulf lease sale to allow time to update required environmental reviews of the region that took the Deepwater Horizon disaster into account. Wednesday’s sale is a combination of the postponed 2011 auction and the one slated for 2012.

Milito noted that recent sale history points to a strong showing on Wednesday. “Going all the way back to 2006,” he said, “you started to see a significant increase in interest when you had 390 leases awarded, then the next year, that got up to nearly 700.”

High bidding has been maintained ever since, Milito noted. “The interest has been there,” he said,” and just as importantly, corresponding to those leases, you’ve also seen pretty high numbers in terms of the bids coming in.”

For instance, in the March 2010 central Gulf sale, the highest bid, from Anadarko and Mariner Energy, totaled $52.5 million for a single block in the Walker Ridge area.

BOEM Director Tommy Beaudreau previously said the auction will give oil and gas companies fresh access “to a number of world-class producing basins, including many in deep-water areas that are becoming increasingly accessible with new technology.”
The auction also gives companies a shot at leases that have been held by companies before and were subsequently returned to the government.

The leases up for grabs in Wednesday’s auction will carry terms of five, seven and 10 years.

Companies also will be putting higher minimum bids down for the tracts. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management hiked the minimum bid in deep water to $100 per acre, up from $37.50, after an analysis of previous lease sales showed tracts that netted less than $100 per acre generally were undeveloped.

This is the last oil and gas lease sale in a five-year plan governing energy development on the outer continental shelf from 2007 to 2012. The Interior Department is finalizing a new five-year plan for July 2012 through 2017 that would schedule 12 sales in the Gulf of Mexico, including one in the central Gulf next year.

The proposed 2012-2017 plan focuses mostly on areas where offshore development is already underway. In addition to the Gulf lease sales, the Interior Department is tentatively planning a sale of leases in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas north of Alaska in 2015 and 2016 respectively. A possible sale of Cook Inlet leases could take place in 2013.

Milito said the focus on well-trodden territory, at least in the Gulf, means the government isn’t doing enough to put new drilling opportunities in the Atlantic and Pacific on the table. He called the proposed five-year leasing plan “insufficient.”

“it is critical to maintain a robust leasing program to allow companies to explore new prospects and replace the production that is coming from existing wells,” Milito said. “Existing wells are continually depleting and need to be replaced with new wells.”

“Maintaining the status quo and narrowing our development focus to restricted areas won’t serve our future well,” Milito added.

Wednesday’s sale is being challenged by conservation groups, including Oceana, the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife and the Southern Environmental Law Center, who say the auction is being conducted without a sufficient environmental analysis of the risks of offshore drilling in the areas for lease and the effects of the 2010 oil spill.

“The government is gambling with the Gulf by encouraging even more offshore drilling in the same deep and treacherous waters that have already proven to be disastrous,” said Jacqueline Savitz, Oceana’s North American vice president. “This greedy rush to expand offshore drilling sets us up for another disastrous oil spill.”

Benjamin Salisbury, an analyst with FBR Capital Markets, said in a research note to clients that he did not expect the last-minute lawsuit, filed on Monday, to halt the auction.

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Tomorrow at the Superdome, offshore oil drilling companies will bid on 38 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management lease sale will be the first oil lease sale since the BP disaster in 2010. But as oil companies grease the wheels, the eyes of the public will be watching. Anne Rolfes, founding director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, announced today at Fair Grinds Coffeehouse that she will lead an independent monitoring group of citizens into the Superdome tomorrow to ensure the public is represented at the table.

Rolfes believes the newly formed Oil Monitoring Group will institutionalize the public’s presence in the oil industry, and added that it usually infuriates the oil industry when groups like hers are present to remind the decision makers that they are accountable to the people of Louisiana for use of the state’s natural resources.

The Oil Monitoring Group is made up of citizen monitors clad in khaki vests, who will engage the oil industry representatives tomorrow to advocate safety, sustainability and transparency within the oil and gas industry. The group’s formation is necessary, Rolfes said, because public resources are not respected as such, and because at meetings like tomorrow’s, only the oil industry and the government make decisions, not citizens.

At the press conference today, Kristen Evans, Art-to-Action Coordinator for the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, showed data collected by Carrie Beth Lasley, Doctoral Candidate of UNO, of accidents and spills in the Gulf over the years, from the big ones to the lesser known. There have been 4,500 oil spills since the BP disaster, according to the National Response Center. Every three years, these smaller spills amount to the quantity of oil spilled in the BP disaster, Evans said.

“An oil spill the size of a grapefruit can create an oil sheen that stretches a mile,” Evans said.

The minimum bid for an acre in the Gulf is set at $100. The acres to be bid on tomorrow range from 9 feet deep to 11,000 feet (twice as deep as the Macondo field where the Deepwater Horizon blew out).

On Monday, four national environmental groups filed suit in federal court in Washington, D.C., in an attempt to halt the oil lease sale tomorrow, the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association reports. The plaintiffs (Oceana, Defenders of Wildlife, Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Biological Diversity) claim the federal agency hosting the sale, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, has not fully analyzed or addressed the risks to wildlife and the environment from spills in the aftermath of the BP disaster.

Tonight, the Oil Monitoring Group will train interested citizens at 7:00pm at Fair Grinds Coffeehouse for tomorrow’s engagement.

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NEW ORLEANS — Louisiana’s March sale of petroleum rights to government-owned land and waterbottoms brought in

$11.5 million as interest in oil and natural gas exploration continued a sharp shift to the southern parishes.

Last week, the board awarded 32 leases covering more than 15 acres. Of those, 30 were in southern parishes.

Over the past year, the monthly sale has seen a growing trend of more interest in southern Louisiana following an earlier rush to the Haynesville Shale of northwestern Louisiana, which is believed to have natural gas reserves of up to 39 trillion feet.

Industry analysts say that with oil prices bouncing around $100 per barrel, and with natural gas prices largely stuck at $4 per thousand cubic feet and lower, drillers will be turning more of their attention to looking for oil.

Recently, Rehan Rashid, energy analyst with FBR Capital Markets, said he expects Haynesville drilling to be cut in half over the next year or so with the current scenario of oil and natural gas prices.

The energy board said that for the fiscal year that began July 1, the state has collected $35.9 million for government mineral rights.

In the latest sale, $9.4 million was paid for rights in the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge. owned by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, and the Loggy Bayou Wildlife Management Area, which is owned by LDWF, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Louisiana State Land Office.

“In a tight budget year, the mineral revenues generated in the March sale will help us maintain Louisiana’s incredible natural and wildlife resources,” said LDWF Secretary Robert Barham.

Money from the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge in Cameron Parish will be placed in the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge and Trust Fund and Protection Fund.

Money from the Loggy Bayou Wildlife Management Area in Bossier Parish will go to the LDWF Conservation Fund, the agency’s primary operating fund.

LDWF does not use state general funds.

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Drillers have lost time in moratorium

By Bruce Alpert

WASHINGTON — A group of Gulf Coast lawmakers Wednesday proposed legislation that would extend offshore drilling leases for a year to give oil companies back the time they lost from the federal government’s hold on virtually all offshore permitting since last year’s BP oil spill.

“We are no longer living under a moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico, but we are still struggling to live under a permitorium,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who joined Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, in announcing the bill introduction during a Capitol Hill news conference. “There has only been one lease issued — not even for new production — in almost a year in the deepwater. … Giving back this time is simply a matter of fairness.”

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz said the offshore regulatory agency has notified operators that it will review requests for extensions “on a lease-by-lease basis.”

“We will not issue blanket suspensions,” she said.

Landrieu said that given that the BOEMRE says it doesn’t have the staff to enforce the heightened regulations developed since last year’s BP oil spill it would seem “common sense” to give the automatic extensions — thereby freeing the agency from the need to review each permit extension request.

While Landrieu and other Louisiana lawmakers have complained that BOEMRE has been much too slow in resuming Gulf of Mexico drilling, especially in the face of rising gas prices since the recent unrest in the Middle East and Northern Africa, the administration maintains that the delays were needed because until recently the industry didn’t have a detailed oil response plan ready in case of another disaster like last April BP oil spill.

The Hutchison-Landrieu legislation is also sponsored by Sen. David Vitter, R-La.

Original Article

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SHREVEPORT, LA (AP) – Mineral lease bonus payments in the Haynesville Shale natural gas area totaled more than $2.1 million this past week for Caddo Parish and Shreveport.

Parish government raked in another $1.3 million in advance payments as part of an agreement to allow oil or natural gas to be extracted. The state Mineral Board leased rights to about 165 acres of Caddo public property during its auction in Baton Rouge on Wednesday.

The 13 tracts averaged $7,907 per acre with a 25 percent royalty rate for any minerals drawn. Shreveport will receive almost $835,000 for 87 acres, The Times newspaper reported.