Booming Noble plans more Greeley expansion

Firm’s $9.4M addition to include training, fitness facilities

GREELEY — Only one year after completing a two-story 66,500-square-foot field operations center in Greeley in 2012, Noble Energy Inc. put in the paperwork to add 75,300 more square feet to the site to support the rapid growth of its oil and gas operations in the Denver-Julesburg Basin.

The new addition is under construction and is valued at $9.4 million by the city of Greeley’s planning department. It’s the most significant commercial project the city has seen in the past 12 months in terms of cost, and second in size to 100,000 square feet of self-storage units being built by American Self-Serv Storage.

Houston-based Noble Energy (NYSE: NBL) owns 23 acres in the Highpointe Business Park in the West Greeley Tech Center at the southwest tip of the city. The gray structure is visible to travelers along U.S. Highway 34.

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Noble Energy is one of the bigger oil and natural-gas producers in Weld County. It is operating about 6,000 wells between Denver International Airport and Wyoming in the D-J Basin that includes Greeley and Weld County.

The company reported revenue of $1.4 billion and net income of $192 million during its second quarter ending June 30. A quarterly highlight was its record horizontal production of 112,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day from the D-J Basin and Marcellus Shale plays, 56 percent higher than second quarter of last year. The D-J Basin is centered in eastern Colorado and extends into southeast Wyoming, western Nebraska and western Kansas. Marcellus shale is centered in the Appalachian Mountains.

Noble officials did not respond to requests for comment for this article, but in a second-quarter earnings statement, Noble chairman Charles Davidson said the company’s growth plans are on track.

“We continued to make great progress on numerous fronts during the second quarter and find ourselves well-positioned to accelerate our growth profile in the second half of 2014 and into 2015,” Davidson said.

The company is accelerating its long-term growth plans in the D-J Basin and is forecasting that its production companywide will more than double by 2018, and its cash flow will increase to $1 billion per year.

Noble’s new three-story wing in Greeley will have more offices, training operations and a fitness center for employees. Noble has about 280 employees housed in the original building and about 150 off-site employees, known as pumpers, who maintain and repair wells and visit the main office about once a week.

The new wing will have office space for another 170 employees and 90 pumpers, a training yard and four open-side pavilions housing display and training equipment along with a three-bay loading dock, according to city documents.

Denver-based Barker Architecture handled the design, and Colorado Springs-based G.E. Johnson Construction Co., which built the original center, is building the addition.

Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (NYSE: APC), another large Weld County oil producer, built a 50,000-square-foot office building in the Platteville Energy Park last year to house 150 employees.

Doug Storum can be reached at 303-630-1959 or 970-416-7369 and via email at dstorum@bizwestmedia.com.