‘Forbes’ website lists two corridor firms as ‘stocks under rocks’

Forbes.com says two corridor firms—McMoRan Exploration of New Orleans and Stone Energy of Lafayette—as potential “stocks under rocks.” Peter Ricchiuti, assistant dean at the A. B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University, writes in his monthly blog for the website that the nation’s energy outlook is gaining ground, which makes the two firms “speculating and intriguing investments.” Possibly as soon as this month, McMoRan, a spin-off from minerals giant Freeport-McMoRan, will learn whether its Davy Jones well—the ultradeep hole it has been drilling in 20 feet of water a few miles off the coast of Louisiana’s Vermilion Parish—will be the natural-gas bonanza that preliminary testing suggests it will be. CEO James “Jim Bob” Moffett has long believed that the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico, though widely considered a spent energy source, have phenomenal deposits of natural gas far beneath the pincushion of drilling sites from earlier decades. Freeport-McMoRan relocated its corporate headquarters from New Orleans to Phoenix, leaving behind this unit of 120 employees. “What a delicious irony it would be,” Ricchiuti writes, “if the small unit left behind on Poydras Street turns out to have been the parent company’s most valuable gem.” Stone Energy is drilling several deep and ultradeep wells in Vermilion and Cameron parishes in the belief that gas-bearing reservoirs below the shallow gulf bleed onshore, and that onshore drilling offers a way to tap an abundant hydrocarbon resource without incurring the considerable expenses of underwater operations. Says Ricchiuti: “Both companies represent daring American entrepreneurship at its best.” To read the full column, click here; and read the rest of the 10/12 Corridor Weekly newsletter here.