This month's issue of Oil and Gas Investor is stuffed with news and analysis of oil and gas producer success-in the Arkoma Basin, on Wall Street, on the M&A scene and on the turnaround front. Players in the Arkoma Basin, for example, are taking in more than $3 per thousand cubic feet for their gas product. Discovered reserves in the basin are estimated to total 14.4 trillion cubic feet of gas, and another 4- to 10 Tcf remains to be discovered, reports Peggy Williams, exploration editor. Companies include one of the Arkoma's original players, Southwestern Energy Co., as well as Vastar Resources and Cross Timbers Oil Co. Read about Arkoma producers' plans, in Williams' cover story, "The Arkoma Basin." On the turnaround scene, Rick George graduated from Colorado State University in 1973 with a civil engineering degree. Less than 20 years later, he took the helm of Calgary-based Suncor Energy Inc. and took the company public. Its market cap then was C$1 billion; today, it's eight times that. "Today, we're a completely independent and refocused oil company," George tells senior financial editor Brian A. Toal in "Millennium Man." On the Wall Street front, two Denver-based small caps, Prima Energy and Evergreen Resources, have beat the S&P 500 in the past five years. "Niche focus is part of the story," Toal writes in "Above the Crowd." Meanwhile, most producers finished 1999 with better stock valuations and other financial performance measures than at year-end 1998. But editor Leslie Haines produces a startling fact in the annual "Gauging the Oils" report: production and reserve numbers fell, or remained flat, for about half the companies, if mergers and large acquisitions are omitted. See "Smoother Sailing?" On the M&A front, financial editor Nick Snow discusses the acquisitive Devon Energy's newest big deal: a merger with Santa Fe Snyder. "It looks accretive by every measurement-earnings, cash flow and net asset value per share," John Myers, Austin-based E&P analyst for Dain Rauscher Wessels, tells Snow in "Another Super-Independent is Born." On another note, guest author Gregory B. Barnett of EnerCom Inc., a Denver-based marketing and investor-relations consultant to E&P companies, challenges producers to use the Internet to enlighten investors. Last month, we said E is for earnings. Barnett agrees and adds that it doesn't mean expectations. -Nissa Darbonne, Managing Editor
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