Interview With The Director, Co-Chairman And CEO: Dejour Energy Inc. (DEJ) - Robert L. Hodgkinson
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Robert L. Hodgkinson has been a Director, Co-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Dejour Energy Inc. since 2004. Additionally, he is the president of Hodgkinson Equities Corporation, a private company he established in 1988, which provides consulting services to emerging businesses primarily in the petroleum resource industry. Mr. Hodgkinson was also the Founder and Chairman of Optima Petroleum Corporation, which drilled wells in Alberta, Canada, and the Gulf of Mexico before merging to form PetroQuest Energy, a NYSE-listed company. Subsequently, he founded and was CEO of Australian Oil Fields, which later would merge to become Resolute Energy Inc./Cardero Energy Inc. Early in his career, Mr. Hodgkinson was a Vice President and Partner of Canaccord Capital Corporation, and in 2001, an early-stage investor and original lease financier in Synenco Energy Inc.'s Northern Lights project in the Alberta oil sands.
TWST: Please begin with a brief introduction to the company, including some highlights from its history and an overview of its primary projects.
Mr. Hodgkinson: Dejour is a public company. It trades both on the AMEX and on the senior board of the Toronto Stock Exchange. We put it together in early 2005. We made our first investments in the oil patch in 2007. During that interim period, we raised quite a bit of cash and we were able to make some significant property purchases, both in northeastern B.C./northwestern Alberta, part of the Western Sedimentary Basin in Canada, as well as substantial holdings in northwestern Colorado. Those are the two distinct areas in which we have the lion's share of our projects. Why? In this particular company, which is the third that I've had since I've been building oil and gas companies, I wanted to focus solely on North America, but I wanted to diversify both nationally and also regionally and also geophysically. Northeastern B.C. and Alberta are geophysical, 3D seismic, exploration projects, by and large, whereas western Colorado is really an area of resource plays, which have a very strong engineering function. So we had both of those opportunities.
TWST: Speaking of Colorado, you recently released news regarding the approval by the Colorado Wildlife Commission for Dejour Energy to construct new well pads in the Garfield Creek State Wildlife Area. What is that going to mean for the company, and ultimately, what value will it deliver to shareholders?
Mr. Hodgkinson: The nature of oil and gas pieces in Colorado is very complex and the Bureau of Land Management really owns the lion's share of the oil and gas rights. But there are also private landowners that also own oil and gas rights, and our properties are a mixture of private land holdings and BLM at our lands. Interestingly, on the BLM lands, there are also surface issues, and in our case, the Colorado Wildlife Commission has control of the surface, and so we had to negotiate with them. Previously, we have negotiated with a landowner on which we would also be drilling wells as part of this program, which is right next door to the CWC land, where we built our first drill pad on their property last fall. So with the approval here, now we have access to all of the lands that we wish to drill over the next two or three years in this particular project, and so now that gives us the green light to go and develop this thing in the most cost-conscious fashion possible.
TWST: What other plans for expansion or new projects does Dejour Energy have in the works at this time?
Mr. Hodgkinson: The way that we picked out our lands was the fact that we had multiple opportunities over each of these properties. Usually when we speak of serendipity, we speak of additional depths, that is the opportunity as you go deeper and deeper and deeper. That holds true at Woodrush, which I alluded to with the deeper oil play there, and also holds true at Kokopelli, where we had a deep Mancos gas that has now been drilled to the southeast of this by Williams and to the northwest of this by Antero, and both have been very successful. So we think that our property is very, very prone to Mancos "C" horizontal gas drilling at some point in the future. We're not really interested in drilling it now with 3 gas prices, but it certainly is a reserve for the future, and of course these properties will be helped by production shallower in the Williams Fork for which we really have the potential for 220 wells, although at this point in time, the permits that we have are for, I think, 42.
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