Antero Resources 4Q14: Just Paid $20K/Acre for More Utica Leases

| | | | |
Antero Resources, one of the biggest Marcellus/Utica Shale drillers, issued their fourth quarter operations and hedging report on Wednesday. The report includes a lot of 2014 summary information. It's an important update with a lot of juicy information contained in it. Perhaps the juiciest is buried near the end: Antero closed on a deal to pick up another 12,000 Utica acres, most of it located in Monroe County, OH, from an undisclosed third party. Antero paid an eye-popping $240 million--or $20,000 per acre! The land does have five producing shale wells and an 8-mile pipeline. Figure the wells are worth $8M each (the cost to drill them) and the pipeline is worth $1M per mile, another $8M (this is very rough, back of the envelope stuff). Deducting that from the price you still get $16,000 per acre for the undeveloped land. Yikes. Here's the other things that caught our eye about the update...

To view this content, log into your member account. (Not a member? Join Today!)