By BRIAN GOMEZ
NEW Guinea Energy became one of the last companies to successfully list on the Australian Stock Exchange this year, but its share price slipped from the offer price of A$0.25 to A$0.19.
In a statement last Friday, NGE managing director Jeremy Towner said the company had raised A$17.3 million through its initial public offering to enable exploration to begin next year on six Papua New Guinea tenements covering 52,000sqkm.
Located in Western province, the tenements represented a section of the poorly-explored Papuan Basin.
NGE geologists had already mapped six drillable prospects which reportedly have a potential average size of 60 million barrels oil equivalent in place.
“We have a long future of exploration and potential discovery and development ahead of us,” Mr Towner said, noting that besides the drill-ready targets, the company also had a total of 53 prospects in areas where it holds a 100% equity stake.
Despite the optimism of the company and the bullish sentiment for most oil stocks, NGE shares fell on the first day of trading partly because of previously unsuccessful float attempts.
The Towner father-and-son combination on the NGE board was also key player in Ord Resources, which had been reported as attempting to do a private deal with the Autonomous Bougainville Government on the Bougainville copper mine.
Sydney-based NGE successfully placed 80 million shares at an offer price of A$0.25 each. Shares fell by more than 30% to a low of A$0.16 before recovering to close at A$0.19.
Mr Towner expressed disappointment at the share performance on the first day of trading, while noting that the price of crude oil had risen from US$91 (K267.25) to US$97 (K284.88) a barrel in the past week.
He also said areas adjacent to NGE leases had made discoveries totalling over one billion barrels of oil and 15 trillion cubic feet of gas.
Mr Towner said NGE had been approached by some large companies interested in farming into its PNG acreage and it had engaged Houston-based energy consultants Moyes & Co to assist in the selection of new partners.
The partnership would focus on acreage in PPL267, where a 100km trend of oil seeps had been discovered, indicating the presence of an untested petroleum system with light hydrocarbons, he said.