The January meeting of the Natural Gas Collaborative Group in Montrose included an update on drilling activities and plans by Gunnison Energy Corporation (GEC) and SG Interests.

Reporting for GEC were company officials Brad Robinson and Lee Fyock. The company's plans include drilling two horizontal wells in the Bull Mountain Unit located in Gunnison County.

GEC will re-enter the Spaulding Peak well north of Cedaredge this summer, and it will complete and bring into production a well near Somerset.

Also, said Robinson, GEC is working on a partnership arrangement with Oxbow and a private investor intended to produce coal bed methane for sale to Holy Cross Electric as electric generating fuel. Attempts spanning years to strike a deal with DMEA on the project never worked out, Robinson said.

SG Interests of Houston was represented at the Montrose meeting by company executive Robbie Guinn and others. They intend to drill two gas wells in the Bull Mountain Unit. In addition, they will complete three shale wells. Four other gas wells have been completed recently; the company has completed work on a water storage facility, and SG plans to construct some gathering lines.

Guinn reported that a field-wide Environmental Assessment for the Bull Mountain Unit, located mostly in remote Gunnison County, will be complete in the near future, possibly during February. In the company's future plans are potentially 36 new well pads with 150 new gas wells.

Drilling opponents in the North Fork Valley have faulted the BLM and exploration companies for not disclosing who nominated 22 North Fork Valley minerals parcels for inclusion in a scheduled August lease auction.

Federal regulations require those names be withheld until two days following the sale, explained Barb Sharrow, BLM field office manager.

Guinn said that SG and other companies typically don't disclose which parcels they have nominated for a lease sale. That is because disclosing the information tells other companies what SG has discovered or is interested in, thus inviting bid competition and increasing prices.

All exploration companies wanting to bid on a lease are encouraged to do so in the BLM process, but they should be required to do their own research and due diligence on a lease tract instead of being allowed to speculate on top of the work that SG or another company has done and paid for, Guinn explained.

Because of the large public interest in the scheduled August North Fork sale, Guinn did disclose that SG nominated a 299-acre parcel in its current Bull Mountain Unit operating area in Gunnison County.

Robinson of GEC added that his company has no idea who nominated the 22 lease tracts in Delta county. "We don't know who nominated them or what geologic formation they are looking at," he said.

The local BLM natural resource staff gave a presentation showing the 30,000 North Fork Valley acres included in the August BLM minerals lease sale which comprise a fraction of the estimated 185,000 acres already leased for minerals activity in the area east of Highway 65 in the Uncompahgre Field Office.

Charlie Richmond, GMUG forest supervisor, told the group that an exploration company is discussing a 70-well project and a pipeline that could parallel the Bull Mountain pipeline.