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Tullow Oil, Leed Petroleum, Petroneft, Aurelian Oil & Gas, Thor Mining, Brinkley Mining news briefs

By Fox-Davies Capital

Tullow Oil announced its intention to place up to 80,431,796 new ordinary shares in the Company with both new and existing institutional investors. Proceeds will be used to facilitate the acquisition of assets in Uganda, and, together with the proceeds from the anticipated farmdown process, to provide the Company with a more appropriate capital structure for the medium term.

Leed Petroleum announced that it has signed a turnkey contract with Applied Drilling Technology, Inc. to drill the Ship Shoal 201 A-6 well and anticipates that the well will be spudded shortly. The A-6 well will target one proved undeveloped sand containing audited gross 2P reserves of 2,537mboe (85% gas) and test two exploratory objectives. The Company also completed the acquisition of the Ship Shoal 202 'A' Platform, and regulatory approval to reuse the platform has been granted. The Ship Shoal 201 A-6 well will be drilled from this platform in order to expedite commencement of anticipated production.

Petroneft provided an update on operations at Licences 61 and 67 in the Tomsk Oblast, Russia. The company announced that drilling rig has been successfully mobilised to the Lineynoye Pad A site and rig-up operations are underway.  Rig-up and commissioning is scheduled  to take approximately 8 weeks with spudding of the  first well of  the 2010  nine well development drilling program anticipated in early April 2010.

Aurelian Oil & Gas announced that it has priced its previously announced proposed placing at 32p per share which will raise gross proceeds of approximately EUR39 million through the issue of 106,433,438 new ordinary shares.

Thor Mining announced that the Company proposes to raise approximately AUD$250,000 (approximately ?140,000 at current exchange rates) by way of a placing of 16,666,667 new ordinary shares of 0.3p each in the capital of the Company through the issue of 16,666,667 voting CDI’s in the Company at 1.5 cents per CDI to sophisticated investor clients of Taylor Collison Limited in Australia. Completion of the placing and the receipt of funds are anticipated to take place within the next week. The company intends to make an application to ASX Securities Limited for listing of these CDI’s in due course. The Directors advise that Thor is actively seeking new projects with an emphasis on mainstream commodities to enhance its portfolio and funds raised by the Placing will be used to evaluate new projects to supplement the Molyhil Tungsten & Molybdenum project. As announced on 19 November 2009 Molyhil is currently on hold due to the depressed price of Molybdenum.

Brinkley Mining announced that it had purchased. An investment of 8.13 per cent in Dragon Mining. The Board of Brinkley is pleased to announce that it has today purchased a further 4.5 per cent of Dragon for a further cash consideration of A$3M, equivalent to approximately ?2M at current exchange rates. Following this further investment, Brinkley now owns approximately12.68 per cent of Dragon. The investment has been financed from Brinkley Mining's cash balances.