Mark made us an offer: He would support our efforts in the Marcellus Shale if we could find a way to drill our way into the play. That way, EOG could avoid the costs of buying the land and instead focus on using its horizontal drilling and fracking expertise to test our ideas.
“Deal,” I said. We’d figure out a way to make it happen.
Later that year, we got a big break...
Seneca Resources – a subsidiary of National Fuel Gas (NFG) – revealed that it was searching for a partner to explore on and develop its land in the Marcellus Shale. The company owned the mineral rights to 1 million acres across Pennsylvania and New York.
After Seneca’s announcement, the race was on...
Rumor has it that Texas-based E&P companies Range Resources (RRC) and Cabot Oil and Gas (COG) put in bids. Then, Chesapeake Energy threw its name into the mix. I heard the company offered $30 million in cash. That offer would be hard to beat... Seneca likely wouldn’t turn down $30 million in cash for a five-year lease. At EOG, we weren’t spending that kind of money, not in Appalachia at least. Instead, we needed to rely on our technical expertise – “use the drill bit” – to get in the game or we’d miss out on this opportunity. A few days later, I watched in real time from a conference room in Pittsburgh as we fracked a well in the Barnett Shale – roughly 1,200 miles away. EOG had partnered with Pinnacle Technologies to gather data that would allow the company to improve its production and increase the overall recovery of natural gas from its shale wells. Pinnacle developed a way to “hear” rocks breaking as a frac job progressed through the various stages. The sounds – picked up by geophones placed in a nearby “monitor” wellbore – helped determine the extent and effectiveness of the frac job. As the frac job progressed, Pinnacle’s software converted the sounds to small points that were plotted on a wellbore and subsurface diagram.
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