Occidental Petroleum Corporation Q3 2009 Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-10-22 14:16:08.0

Tags: Occidental Petroleum Corp., Call Transcript, Earnings, Zone, Oil Zone, Seeking Alpha

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator instructions) And your first question comes from Robert Kessler of Simmons.

Robert Kessler Simmons & Company International

Good morning gentlemen. I wanted to see if you could elaborate on a few things with respect to your Kern County activity. One being on Elk Hills, you have disclosed previously that you're going to bump up against some processing capacity limits that. Can you update us with respect to the timing of expansion and the likely cost? And at what point might we start to flatten out in terms of the California production growth as that becomes the bottleneck or can you keep growing for the next few quarters without that being limiting factor?

Bill Albrecht

We still have some more room in our facilities in gas currently. At the current rate of growth obviously, we will probably going to run out sometime. But they have plans to bring skid mount facilities to handle the gas. There was a slowing down some of the less economic activities in the Elk Hills area to create more room for this. We don't have any idea. We can’t say how big the facility is at this point, since we still have fair number of unknowns about how much gas we are going to make the process. So that's part of one delay as we just don’t know how big a plant to build. The numbers we told you last week maybe a little. So I think what we are as far as the growth that we would expect continued growth for a few more quarters. We just don't know at this point where it's going to wind up. It continues to do extremely well.

Robert Kessler Simmons & Company International

Sure. And then as you shift your focus more towards the oily – of the wells, you’ve been on course around two thirds gas so far. In expectation for average well productivity. It's been quite strong with the gas related well. Do expect a similar rate of production on, say, barrels oil equivalent basis even with the oily this?

Bill Albrecht

The oil zone is fundamentally less – has less permeability than in the gas zone. Gas zone is a very permeable zone. The oil zone is a little less, but again, of course you're getting a little more money for the going on a BOE basis than you get for gas. So, it probably will turn out to be more economic to drill oil wells right now than the gas wells. But the gas wells are very prolific as you can see. We could probably lose the production in the gas wells even further from existing wells if we let it – if we open it up further.

 

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