Site Visit to Oil & Gas Platforms

I've been too busy to post the past couple days -- when I haven't been taking meetings about an oil & gas explorer that is working off the coast of Louisiana, I've been running over to the 2007 New Orleans Investment Conference. I've talked to CEOs and representatives of a bunch of very interesting companies, as well as some old friends. And Red Hot Resources subs hit PT1 on one of their positions -- I'm monitoring everything, thank goodness for wireless -- so I had to write a quick issue. It's been pretty frantic.

But here are some photos from the site inspection we did yesterday.

Here is my ride -- a Sikorsky 76, the Cadillac of the skies.
Well, maybe not a Cadillac -- there are bigger helicopters -- but this seats 12. We took off from the helipad next to the Superdome ...
Here's where I say "bye-bye, N'awlins -- we're off to the swamps." First, though ...We flew and flew and flew to refuel at a busy heliport where there were enough birds landing and taking off to cause a bit of a traffic jam. These guys are playing chicken with us (not really, LOL). But that's awfully close for comfort, eh? Finally ...
Hello, swampland. By my figuring, it's not so much land as a less-wet part of the ocean, lol.
This is the first site -- a barge rig that is drilling a good prospect. You can see it's been parked next to a busy canal intersection and that's barge traffic coming in from the right side. This part of Louisiana is crawling with barges, fishing boats, you name it.

Then we flew offshore, over a nature preserve, to the actual Gulf of Mexico to our second site ...
This one is a working production platform with three wells. You can see a helipad over one of the wells, but it was too small for comfort for our helicopter (you can see our helicopter's shadow). At least, that's what they told me. I think they were more worried about losing their CEO and more all in one shot if we messed up our landing. Har-har!

Anyway, it was a busy day, and very informative.

So what company was it? You'll have to tune in to Money and Markets next week to find out.

Check out my new gold and energy blog at MoneyAndMarkets.com