Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Yes sir. (Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Irene Haas - Canaccord Adams.
Irene Haas - Canaccord Adams
You know, your Gulf Coast strategy, you know, is it sort of out [manting] your main core area in the North Sea or do you have ideas of growing it? And then secondary just sort of debt pay down for 2009.
William L. Transier
Irene, I’ll take the first one and turn the second one over to Mike. Our U.S. strategy is as I alluded to earlier is really to balance out some of the long cycle times that we see in the North Sea, plus when equity values have gotten down to where they’re at the NOL we have in the U.S. is actually a significant asset to our shareholders, and we felt an obligation to try and unlock that value. To your question if – because asset values and equity values in the U.S. have come down to a spot where you look at that on a per boe or per mcfe basis it makes sense for us to look at the opportunity to add to our overall portfolio with maybe a U.S. position.
What we’ve talked about and what John talked about is kind of a program for drilling in south Texas, an area that gives us some exposure. It’s obviously not enough to call a real business for ourself and if we’re going to do something in the United States we’d probably have to make some sort of acquisition, assets or some sort of company going forward. We would love to build a big enough position but our focus really has to remain in the North Sea. These three large development projects, you know, they could actually represent a very significant amount of production.
We’ve talked about 2x production but John talked about the productivity of the wells in Rochelle alone. If we had three producing wells there you could produce up to almost 22,000 boes a day net to our interest, if it worked that way. Now we’re not counting on that. We talked about something a lot more risk adjusted than that, so we have to stay focused on the North Sea and move those assets forward. If the U.S. comes along and we can do some things to balance the portfolio, add some production to offset some of the declines we see, we will do that.
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