HispanicBusiness

SandRidge Energy has both the money to fund its horizontal drilling program and the results needed to justify spending it in Kansas next year, company president Matt Grubb told a group of Kansas oilmen Monday.

Grubb was one of the main speakers at the Kansas Independent Oil & Gas Association convention at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Wichita Airport.

The Oklahoma City company is one of the biggest players in the Kansas oil patch with 10 rigs that will have completed about 100 horizontal wells by the end of this year.

He said the company recently closed on $1.1?billion in financing to pay for its 2013 activities. SandRidge expects to drill roughly 200 wells in Kansas in 2013 and more in Oklahoma, he said.

The company has had several wells produce more than 1,000 barrels per day of oil equivalent -- oil or its equivalent energy in natural gas or gas liquids -- but the average across its Kansas and Oklahoma wells is 325 barrels of oil equivalent per day.

He said slightly more than half of what they extract is oil, and the rest is gas or gas liquids.

Right now, the program is accelerating at a pretty fast clip.

"We don't know where it going to level out, but so far, we're very happy with it," he said.

Also speaking at the convention was Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental Resources, the largest leaseholder in the Bakken Shale formation in North Dakota, and energy adviser to the campaign of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Hamm, who was at KIOGA's convention mainly to drum up support for Romney, said the Republican candidate's energy platform includes energy independence, which Hamm said is conceivable because of horizontal drilling. He said such independence would aid national security, the trade imbalance and jobs.

"They say the unemployment rate is 3 percent in North Dakota -- we can't find them," he said.

He also advocates letting states regulate all drilling.