Excerpts
The Western Haynesville is not so much a new play as it is a deeper, more technically challenging, more expensive, lower return version of the old Haynesville. Market participants old enough to remember XTO or ECA’s drilling in East Texas know the “Western Haynesville” by other names.
We were able to go take an old, old gas field, which is now we call the Western Haynesville, we went deeper just like we did in the core of the Haynesville/Bossier and we figured out that technically that we can drill and complete these wells
Anyways, Allison is glad they spent the years and capital building their new position. At least, we think that is what this means.
I told someone that it’s like a dog chasing a car and catching it. That’s what we did in Western Haynesville. We caught the 450,000 net acres and now we’re learning how to drive the car or in our case, develop the Western Haynesville well-by-well.
We have been fascinated by this slow motion car wreck driven by – their words – a successful dog, with the company insisting on ballooning its balance sheet to lock down the new acreage position. It doesn’t look that bad on this chart because they are starting from a high level, but there were still questions over by what strategy, Comstock would be out-spending cashflows to drill wells for natural gas. In an over-supplied gas market where top operators are withholding production and spending (see our natgas note on EQT and CHK yesterday).