Magnum Hunter CEO Expresses Excitement Over Utica Shale
Gary Evans, the CEO of Magnum Hunter Resources Corp., spoke at the IPAA OGIS San Francisco Conference, and he had quite a bit to say about the Utica shale. Seeking Alpha has the whole transcript here, but here is a sampling of what Evans said about the Utica play:
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What do we love about the Utica? It gathered all. It’s got resistivity. It’s got porosity, permeability, depth, pressure. It’s got fracking mechanisms. Everybody talks about the Utica Shale. Nobody drills the Utica, they drill the Point Pleasant and surrounded by Utica with a shale above and below it.We’re seeing a geo-pressured regime here like we’ve never seen before. So our first well, the Farley well actually blew out on us in a natural fracture, we didn’t frac the well. So we’re pretty excited about what we’re seeing. We had totally changed our drilling techniques in this region using South Louisiana Gulf Coast technology with high pressure, well heads, 10,000 pounds well heads, double BOPs.So we bought in gulf coast engineers to manage the drilling process. Nobody has seen this kind of pressure and this kind of flow rates. We’re talking about gas wells in this region that will flow 20 million or 30 million. I think we’ll see 50 million gas flows here next year.So this is the acreage bar I just mentioned 32,000 acres at $4,400 bucks an acre. And we are pretty excited about this acreage and what it does for us. This is just I think one of the other banks that put together comparing the Utica to other plays in the U.S. based on productive capacity and development parameters and you could see why comparisons are still favorable.The lithology, the Point Pleasant is actually a very thin, high-permeable carbonate stringers that can encased the rock. And the combination of that with over-pressured shales helps explain why the flow rates are so high. So it’s got really low water saturation, gives huge advantages of large reserves per acre. It doesn’t seem to be water sensitive which also is a major plus that we usually see in shales.So this is our first well. The Farley is the one I mentioned that blew out on us. It’s about on the horizontal section. We came very, very close to losing this well. We had about 80 foot flare for four days. It’s a very rich gas about 40% liquids and we are completing this well as we speak.
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