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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On Saturday, Triad Hunter, wholly-owned drilling subsidiary of Magnum Hunter Resources, lost control of a Utica Shale well in Monroe County, OH. The well had been drilled and temporarily plugged as the company planned to drill three more wells at the pad. However, “the well began to flow uncontrollably while recommencing production operations” according to a statement released by Magnum Hunter. Well pad personnel along with 28 homes located within a mile and a half were evacuated. Wild Well Control of Houston has been contacted and (presumably) now on site to contain the well. No injuries have been reported…
Some encouraging numbers from a set of well pads in the Ohio Utica Shale from Eclipse Resources. Eclipse’s Shroyer well pad in Eastern Monroe County, OH has two wells producing a combined 42.5 MMcf/d–VERY healthy initial production numbers and something to crow about. They also have a 5-well pad, the Mizer pad in Central Harrison County, OH, that’s producing a combined 10.1 MMcf/d of natural gas and approximately 1,800 Bbl/d of condensate. Not much in the way of methane but a decent amount of condensate production. How do the two sets of wells stack up against each other? Let’s run the economic numbers for Eclipse on the methane only vs condensate wells. Which do you think earns them more money?…
Three weeks ago MDN highlighted news from NGI’s Shale Daily that Magnum Hunter Resources had purchased the mineral rights for two former Ormet properties in Ohio and West Virginia (see