Dempsey Grants Prospecting Licence

national | environment | news report Thursday April 26, 2007 23:55 by S.Cat

Still No Announcement of Review of Terms

It's always worth keeping an eye on what is happening in government departments during the dying days of an administration. Minister Noel Dempsey has promised a number of times to review the terms under which licences are awarded, but to date, nothing has been announced. But sharp-eyed visitors to the Department of Marine website will have noticed that there was a slight change today.

The brief announcement was as follows:
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Notice of Intention to Grant a Petroleum Prospecting Licence

The Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources , Mr. Noel Dempsey T.D., hereby gives notice that, in exercise of the powers conferred on him by subsection (1) of Section 9 of the Petroleum and Other Minerals Development Act, 1960, as applied by subsection (2) of Section 4 of the Continental Shelf Act, 1968, he intends to grant a non-exclusive petroleum prospecting licence to:

GX Technology Corporation
2101 CityWest Blvd.
Building III, Suite 900
Houston, TX 77042
USA

in respect of certain areas designated under Section 2(3) of the Continental Shelf Act, 1968, and that he has deposited in the Office of the Geological Survey of Ireland, Beggar's Bush, Haddington Road, Dublin 4, a map showing the boundaries of such areas.

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Maybe it's nothing. Maybe a small company which specialises is seismic exploration (part of the bigger IO group) is just going to have a look at what's out there because, you know, things are slow, and there are too many people hanging around the office. They don't expect to find anything, and if they did, sure they would never make any money on it.

We're always hearing how the area off the west coast is such a terrible place to look for oil and gas that we should be happy that anyone at all can be bothered to explore there.

In fact, it's so difficult to get anything out from the waters here, that we should nearly be paying them to take the stuff off our hands...

The website doesn't seem to show exactly where GX have got, for that info you'll have to go in person to Haddington Road, but the attached map does show the state of play up to February this year.

Since GXT doesn't own any rigs, wherever they are prospecting, they'll have to work with one of the big energy companies to extract anything they find.

Thank heavens we don't have a state company like those backward places in the third world. If we did, that would mean we could be working with prospecting companies on profiting from our own oil and gas.

When these resources are gone, we don't want anything to remember them by.

Let's make a clean break, and forget that we have all these resources cluttering up the place.

Where do you think this is- Nigeria?