WhitMar Exploration Company is a private oil and gas company located in Denver, Colorado is engaged in the generation and development of natural gas and oil prospects in the continental United States. The company was founded in 1979 by Whitney Marvin, who continues to manage the company today with a team of professionals experienced in the domestic oil and gas business. Since its inception, WhitMar has internally generated the majority of its drilling prospects with natural gas as the primary target.
During the boom of the early 1980's the company developed and drilled oil and gas prospects for itself and its investing partners, the majority of whom were other oil and gas companies which managed public drilling limited partnerships. The crash in prices in the mid 1980's resulted in the demise of the drilling limited partnerships and a lack of interest in drilling for new reserves by the investing public and the major oil companies. As a consequence, the company spent less time generating oil and gas prospects and diversified into the gas compression business.
In 1986, WhitMar started Arkoma Compression Company as a gas compressor rental company to provide the compression necessary to produce gas from the older depleting gas fields in the US. For the next twelve years WhitMar built the compressor company into one of the largest providers of gas compression in the Mid-Continent, and in 1998 sold it to the largest compressor rental company in the world.
Since the mid 1990's WhitMar has reenergized its exploration team by hiring additional geoscientist and acquiring new technical hardware and software to support our exploration effort. The company is now devoting all of its efforts to the generation and development of high quality oil and natural gas prospects, exposing itself and its partners to exceptional investment opportunities. Currently, the company is aggressively leasing, drilling and developing shale gas prospects in the Appalachian Basin and the Mid-Continent region of the US and tight oil prospects in the Rocky Mountain, Mid-Continent and Ark/La/Tex regions of the US.
Through the 1990's up to the present, WhitMar has focused its exploration efforts in shale gas and a tight oil resource plays in the US. The company has leased large leasehold positions in the various basins active for Shale gas and tight oil resources plays and formed numerous joint ventures for the development and production of oil and gas from these positions, i.e. 200,000 acres in the Appalachian Basin for the Marcellus Shale gas play, and 20,000 acres in the Williston Basin for the Bakken Three forks tight oil play, and 50,000 acres in the DJ Basin for the Niobrara/Pennsylvanian tight oil play and 30,000 acres in central Louisiana for the Haynesville gas play.
Natural gas has become the environmentally preferred fuel in the US for heat and it has become the preferred fuel source for power generation in the US. As demand has increased the demand supply ratio for natural gas as tightened; which has lead to dramatic increase in the value of natural gas, dramatically improving the economics of natural gas exploration today. WhitMar is bullish on the future of natural gas, as demand continues to rise from existing users and different sources of demand arise for this environmentally friendly fuel source.
We will continue to develop our substantial acreage position in various US shale gas plays to take advantage of the improving fundamentals for natural gas development in the US.