EnerVest Selling Utica Acres; Sale Could Bring $6 Billion

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – The 58 wells that Chesapeake Energy Corp. has drilled in eastern Ohio’s Utica shale play will soon have a new co-owner, now that EnerVest Ltd. has announced it will sell drilling rights to 539,000 acres.

The privately held Houston holding company, which has drilled another four Utica wells on its own, is expected to receive about $6 billion for these assets. Company executives “have traveled to China, Japan an Korea to market the properties and say they have also received interest from U.S. energy producers and financial firms,” the Wall Street Journal reports (READ STORY). 

Just last week Chesapeake Energy said it would sell a portion of its assets in the Permian Basin in Texas to EnerVest Ltd. The company operates a separate, publicly traded master limited partnership known as EV Energy Partners LP.

EnerVest and its EV subsidiary are the biggest producers of oil and gas in Ohio.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the company has “little appetite for the risk and expense of developing new shale formations, where fracked wells cost upwards of $6 million apiece.”

In late August EnerVest announced the results of one of the partnership’s wells drilled in Carroll County, near the border of Tuscarawas County. The company and its affiliates own a 93% working interest in the Cairns 5H well, which produces 1,300 barrels of liquids per day, according to reports. The well was drilled to a depth of 12,693 feet with the horizontal section measuring 5,384 feet and completed with 19 stages, EnerVest said.

The Cairns well falls short of the huge results announced in late August by Gulfport Energy at its Wagner 1-28H well in Harrison County. Daily production capacity there is 1,881 barrels of natural gas liquids (after processing) and 432 barrels of oil, Gulfport said. With these results, the Wagner well is outperforming the Buell well in Harrison County, Chesapeake's top producing well in the Utica play.

The Utica land EnerVest is selling is both totally owned by the company or co-owned with other companies. The Texas company said it would retain ownership of 321,000 net acres in the shale play, or about 30% of its total acreage.

Published by The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.