ERHC At A Turning Point Today

Update 12:25am EST 03/14/05: Since ERHE opened at $0.68, my order wasn't filled. Yes, the stock opened 20 percent higher than Friday's $0.565 close at $0.68, reached $0.697, and is now $0.10 higher at $0.665 bid, $0.67 asked on volume of 3,930,958 shares.

The Los Angeles Times, Dow Jones News Service and Houston Chronicle have all weighed in with major front-page articles on ERHC Energy (OTC BB symbol: ERHE), and under the glaring, critical eyes of reporters and editors our investment has been found not only sound, but ripe for appreciation.

"Tiny player strikes gold in huge oil deal" - the Chronicle's front-page, above-the fold headline yesterday - is a fundamental statement of the truth about this stock.

Now, we have to wait for the world to catch up on its reading.

I became an investor in ERHC, which recently changed its symbol to ERHE, on the Monday following the article in the Los Angeles Times in late May of 2003. The stock rose 21 cents over those three days, and I quickly accumulated 175,000 shares. Just before they topped out at .43 a few months later, I sold my stake for a $27,000 profit.

Today (even though I needed the money then), I wish I hadn't. The 123,040 shares I now own are hardly enough to make up the difference I might have earned had I held those first $.215 shares and held on - but "might have" is a perilous illusion. I didn't.

As we weait for the market to open a few hours from now, I think we are on the brink of a great new wave of buying interest in ERHC, occasioned not just by the Houston Chronicle article and the others, but by a new set of circumstances which uniquely apply to ERHC Energy.

Among these considerations are:

• We have no outstanding debt. While the article points out that we only have $21,000 in cash, that's plenty for now - we only have one employee to pay.
  
  
• We have withstood the scrutiny of some of the best business reporters in the world - Ken Silverstein of the Times; Washington Bureau, David Ivanovich of the Chronicle's Washington bureau, and Norval Scott of the Dow Jones News Service's London bureau. As they have noted, our contracts and our rights are intact after innumerable challenges, threats and charges.
  
  
• We are no longer quite so unknown as we were in the late Spring of 2003. Not only have these reporters studied us, but so also have dozens of reporters for news outlets around the globe from the Financial Times to Forbes to Reuters. And while all these media have examined our bona fides, few have ever speculated about what the effect of awards in the Nigeria-Sao Tome and Principe Joint Development Zone may be on our share price.
  
  
• Unlike in 2003, when awards also appeared to be near, they are near now - they could even come this week, or early next.
  
  
• UpstreamOnline reported two weeks ago that we "are in line" for operatorships in three of the JDZ blocks - a fantasy, perhaps, but perhaps one of the very few that become real.
  
  
• The "launch pad" for ERHC is - thanks to the Chronicle - likely to be far higher than if the article had not come out before awards. It is one thing to go from $0.19 to $0.40 over three days when the stock is unknown, but it is quite another to start at $0.564 when the article came out, probably just a week ahead of awards. We can expect very significant gains just from news of our guaranteed rights being awarded.
  
  
• The Houston Chronicle is the premier voice of America's powerful Oil Patch, and when they examined the issue of reserves in the Joint Development Zone, they came up with an authoritative figure more than 250 percent higher than most investors have used to gauge a possible share price. Our combined rights in the JDZ amount to about 14 percent of the 11 billion estimated reserves the Chronicle found, and at a price of $53 per barrel, they can be valued at more than $81 billion. We probably cannot hope to realize more than $10 billion of that, yet even that gives our $0.564 stock of today a future 1:1 value of $14.10.
  

I put in an order this morning on E*Trade for 3,000 more shares at $0.57. If the rush is anything like the one that followed the Los Angeles Times article in May 2003, even that small investment will be worth it. Let's see where $1,700 goes from here.