Production began Jan. 14, and the gas is being sold to both Enstar Natural Gas Co. and ConocoPhillips Alaska Inc. under contracts Buccaneer has signed with both companies.

“Based on the available information the company is confident that the (Kenai Loop No. 1) well can be produced at higher rates,” Buccaneer spokesman Dean Gallegos said. “The current production rate will be maintained and monitored over the next 30 to 60 days and, if appropriate at that time, a decision will be made to increase production rates.”

Buccaneer’s discovery of gas at a location one mile from the long-producing Cannery Loop gas field on the Kenai Peninsula is being cited widely as proof that substantial amounts of gas are yet to be discovered in the Cook Inlet basin. Read more >>>

Drilling will begin when a 3-D seismic survey at the field is completed, company CEO James Watt told the Resources Committee of the state Senate.

Buccaneer now has one well producing 5,000 Mcf/day of gas in the field and plans to increase its production to 15,000 Mcf/day day later this year, Watt said.   Buccaneer also plans more drilling, including two wells at an offshore prospect in Cook Inlet with a jack-up rig due to arrive in June, a third offshore well at a third offshore prospect later in the year, and another onshore prospect in the southern Kenai Peninsula area, Watt told the legislators….Watt said Buccaneer will be using the Endeavour jack-up rig that is owned jointly with Singapore-based Ezion Holdings, and that will be brought to Cook Inlet from Singapore in June.

Buccaneer is also close to closing a deal to acquire leases in the Cosmopolitan oil prospect in the Inlet from Pioneer Natural Resources.

Adam Shapiro, the previous vice president and senior engineer for Citigroup Client Infrastructure Peering, has joined Breakthrough Technology Group as chief technology officer and managing director of the company’s virtualization practice. According to Shapiro, it was the company’s reputation as a “cutting-edge, proven cloud and managed services provider” that sealed his decision to hop onboard.  While at Citigroup, Shapiro oversaw the company’s data center automation and engineered the global deployment of Citigroup’s virtualization project, which involved the deployment of collaboration tools and streaming resources including Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp, AppSense, VMware View, Liquidware Stratusphere, and Microsoft SharePoint.

Thanks to Shapiro’s extensive contributions, Citigroup has become one of the largest virtual computing environments across the globe.