Sklar Exploration Company L.L.C401 Edwards Street, Ste. 1601 , Shreveport, Louisiana, United States

Sklarco L.L.C. and its affiliated operating company, Sklar Exploration Company L.L.C., are independent exploration and production companies owned and managed by Howard F. Sklar.  For more than 80 years and under the leadership of three generations, the Sklar family has prospered in the oil and gas industry. With offices in Boulder, Colorado and Shreveport, Louisiana, Sklar owns interests in oil and gas wells located throughout the United States. Sklars exploration and production activities center on the hydrocarbon-rich Lower Gulf Coast basins, primarily in South Texas, and in the Interior Gulf Coast basins of East Texas, North Louisiana, South Arkansas, South Mississippi and South Alabama.  We credit our achievements and extensive history with building and maintaining an extraordinarily talented team and a long tradition of excellence in capital allocation directed toward the exploration for and exploitation of crude oil and natural gas reserves.

It is an honor and a privilege to follow in the footsteps of my Father, Albert Sklar, and Grandfather, Sam Sklar, and to lead this generation of the Sklar familys exploration and production activities. In many ways, our current activities are similar to those of the past. We are active in many of the same basins. We have maintained business relationships with many of the same employees, investors and vendors. We have even experienced a proliferation of activities in old fields which have been core properties for the Sklar family for decades.  Yet the oil and gas business always changes and is certainly different today than in the past. The maturity of onshore oil and gas exploration has caused us to drill to deeper depths and to explore in basins we previously ignored, such as South Texas Gulf Coast and South Alabama. Higher natural gas and crude oil prices have caused us to redefine our understanding of a "good well" and to look for hydrocarbons in rock, such as coal and shale, we previously considered insufficiently porous and permeable to produce. The scarcity of experienced personnel and good equipment has made our relationship with employees and vendors more important than ever.  We are an "independent" in all of the best senses of the word. We do not have to try to please shareholders and banks and are free to make the best long term decisions regarding the drilling and completion of wells, regardless of the short-term consequences. Likewise, we do not mind being innovative and trying new techniques. We realize that failure is a part of any exploration business and strive to learn from all of our experiences, regardless of their success or failure. We are not always looking to sell assets, believing instead that good assets are hard to find and, when discovered, should be aggressively developed.  In discussing the oil and gas business with other executives, I consistently hear that the business is more challenging today than the business our fathers and grandfathers knew. Whether true or not, the corollary is that we are being paid good prices for product that our ancestors sometimes gave away in the past. In summary, it is both the challenge and the reward that captivates me and motivates me to dedicate my time and efforts, and our familys resources, to the oil and gas business.