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…
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Not much to report on this, thankfully. MDN has told you in the past one of the most under-appreciated stories we know of is that the only Proctor & Gamble manufacturing plant out of their 150 plants worldwide that is 100% energy self-sufficient is a plant in Wyoming County, PA–near Wilkes-Barre in northeast Pennsylvania (see 
Antero Resources said on Monday it will lay off more than 250 contract land brokers operating in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The layoffs will not affect any Antero employees–only contract workers (landmen and others) who work to get leases signed, sealed and delivered for future drilling. Antero blames the low price of oil, which causes the price they get for their Marcellus/Utica natural gas liquids to be low, which means they’ll stick to drilling on the half million plus acres they already have under lease…
Between Christmas and New Year, Middlesex Township (Butler County), PA held the second of what may be up to five hearings on the already-granted permits for Rex Energy to drill five wells on a single well pad in the township. You may recall that two agitating “environmental” groups–headquartered on the other side of the state, in the Philadelphia area–along with four parents from the Mars School District, filed an appeal of the legal and legitimate permits granted by the state Dept. of Environmental Protection to Rex in September (see 
Southwestern Energy is on a tear in the Marcellus/Utica region. In 2014, the company picked up 413,000 acres and some 1,500 wells from Chesapeake Energy for $4.975 billion and paid another $394 million to Statoil as part of that same deal (to get more ownership of the jointly-owned acreage); Southwestern purchased all of WPX’s acreage–46,700 acres and 63 Marcellus Shale wells–in northeast Pennsylvania for $300 million; and Southwestern cut a deal with DTE Energy to significantly expand their pipeline gathering system in northeast PA. They’ve also been busy in several other shale plays. On Monday, Southwestern issued a company update and guidance for 2015. The very notable thing about that update: Southwestern, contrary to almost every other major and minor shale player, is increasing spending on shale drilling in 2015, by $200 million…