Our Focus

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  Juneau Oil & Gas, LLC (JOG) was formed to assemble and focus a world class team of professionals for the purpose of exploring shallow waters (0-200m) of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico to discover and produce new oil and gas fields of significant reserve size. JOG has returned to the roots of the founding members’ past success at an opportune and strategic time in the ever-evolving oil and gas industry. Throughout the careers of JOG’s managerial and technical leadership, generating and drilling geophysically and geologically driven conventional prospects has proven lucrative, repeatable, and predictable within the reasonable risk profile of the industry and the limitations of the state-of-the-art technology and interpretation. 

JOG began its generation process by securing large scale, contiguous offshore 3D seismic data access covering approximately 13.5 million acres across the shallow water Gulf of Mexico. New seismic technology has enabled better definition and placement of geologic features associated with complex salt-related structural regimes, where oil and gas have historically been found. JOG identified, risked, and secured prospects in 12 blocks (11 through lease sale participation) in the shallow Gulf during 2019 alone. The explorationists on staff continue to evaluate this seismic data to identify new prospects, while aiming to spud the first well in the second quarter of the year.  

The offshore conventional realm in the United States is primed for a revival in that the focus of the domestic industry is fixed on the prolific source rocks being exploited in the cost-prohibitive, fiercely competitive unconventional resources and basins across the U.S. The JOG team has vast unconventional experience down to the well-bore level, and has evaluated the major unconventional basins in the U.S., but has chosen to emphasize the conventional reservoirs in the Gulf of Mexico in our future technical efforts where we believe we can achieve significantly higher returns and value creation.   

Targeting the Shallow Waters of the Gulf of Mexico

Conventional reservoirs offer an earlier decision point that can be reached after the well is drilled to total depth and logged, and the commerciality of the discovery can be determined before completion operations begin and before production facilities are installed. A well's economic outlook is known much earlier than those drilled in shale resources, requiring a lower normalized capital investment to test a field's potential and subsequent development risk is therefore relatively low. 

New geophysical data acquisition and processing techniques have revealed that fields of considerable reserves remain undiscovered in the shallow water Gulf of Mexico, and access to large, contiguous 3D seismic data coverage reduces the exploration risk of the prospects generated on those datasets.

Lease acquisition costs and royalty rates in the shallow water Gulf of Mexico are low relative to other basins, and there has been little competition for these leases after the steep and sustained decline in activity over the past decade. JOG has been award four blocks bid in Lease Sale 257 and one block bid in Lease Sale 259 . Juneau bid an average of $30/acre in these sales. In 2019, only 44 blocks in total were bid in the shallow waters.  Juneau was sole bidder on 11 blocks covering 55,000 acres at an average cost of $36/acre.  The royalty rate for the majority of these leases is 1/8th.  Recent legislation (Inflation Act 2022) has set the new minimum royalty rate at 1/6th, a 4-point increase from previous sales, breaking convention set forth in Obama- and Trump-era lease sales. BSEE/BOEM is encouraging application for project specific royalty reduction to incentivize additional drilling and development (BSEE/BOEM Research Supports Revised Strategy for Shallow Water, November 2019). No severance and production taxes are administered in shallow federal waters, however, which increases the margin for meaningful economic return on investment and therefore elevates a greater number of prospects to an economically-viable status. Existing platform and pipeline infrastructure and capacity encourage project development through cost savings. The combination of prospects high-graded toward significant reserves and lower leasing, drilling and development costs will yield high returns, even when risked for observed or anticipated geologic uncertainty. The Juneau team has cumulatively executed above a 70% commercial discovery rate under these similar circumstances.   

Juneau retains approximately 5-15% working interest in house-generated prospects, and actively seeks non-operated working interest with industry partners in GOM exploration as well as onshore US development and exploration.