Rarely a day goes by in the industry journals - and increasingly within the wider global financial press - that unconventional hydrocarbons are not discussed in some context, especially in regard to meeting shortfalls in the predicted future global oil demand. As a company actively involved in unconventional oil development this exposure for Nighthawk Energy Plc (LON:HAWK) is both a huge blessing but also, in some ways, a curse, as the understanding of what constitutes an unconventional development, or how they are developed, is not widely understood; it can be hard enough getting an investment following for the most straightforward conventional story, let alone branding something “unconventional”.

Both oil and gas are represented within the unconventional hydrocarbon sphere, but the term “unconventional” has become a catch-all term encompassing a myriad of different types of extraction method from “simply” hydraulically fraccing a well to steering 30-ton bulldozers around Alberta. Unconventional Gas is principally focused on Coal Bed/Mine Methane, Tight Gas and Shale Gas and is possibly better understood than the unconventional plays of their liquid cousins, which can encompass all manner of concepts from Tight Oil (Shale Oil) all the way to the energy intensive extraction of synthetic heavy bituminous crudes from tar sands. Many of these unconventional developments have been exploited for many years with varying degrees of success and are, by their very nature, highly dependent on the underlying commodity prices for economic viability. However, as previously discussed, one only has to glance at journals these days to see unconventionals as the main topic of conversation in the industry, especially shale gas.

This particular sector has been very active over the last few years on the asset acquisition and divestment front. For example only the other day Mitsui spent $1.5bn for a 35% stake in Anadarko?s Shale Gas acreage in the Marcellus, a major shale gas play in the NE US. This follows many similar deals that have seen BP, BG, Statoil, Eni and Total amongst others take positions in the main US shale gas focus regions. These regions are becoming a major contributor to supply, with the top five shale gas regions accounting for more than 10% of US natural gas production in 2008, a figure which is predicted to rise to 19% by 2012 with an expected 20% of all US drilling activity by this time too.

Nighthawk?s principal asset is a 370,500…

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