Ice Road Blocked

To quote that lady who ran for VP "It's all about jobs"

From Reuters (Yereth Rosen):

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Nov 17 (Reuters) - The Alaska Department of Natural Resources has denied ExxonMobil Corp. a permit to build a seasonal ice road to carry equipment to an oil and gas field the state says it has seized.

Exxon wants the nearly 50-mile road to transport a rig for drilling wells this winter at Point Thomson, a languishing eastern North Slope field of vast oil and natural gas reserves. (Link)

So let's see at today's oil price and with no gas line in place - who exactly is going to step up and drill Pt. Thomson, this winter other than Exxon?

Exxon chief says capital spending still on track

From Bloomberg News (LINK)

Exxon Mobil Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson said the company’s capital spending program hasn’t been scaled back by the drop in crude-oil prices. “Nothing that we had in our plans has been affected by this change in prices,” Tillerson told reporters today at an American Petroleum Institute meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona.

ConocoPhillips and Chevron will announce capital spending plans later this year.

This is good news for the Point Thomson project which will eventually produce gas for the Alaska Gas Pipeline. Point Thomson holds nearly one-fourth of the North Slope's 35 trillion cubic feet of known reserves (Link to Point Thomson Lawsuit story).

We look forward to some positive indication from ConocoPhillips and BP - builders of the Denali gas pipeline.