Nate Labarge's Page

I understand. Most lease deals are just that, a deal.
You either get the terms you want, or you don't take it.
The uncertainty is whether you could have got a better price to lease, and whether a well on your acreage or unit your acreage is in, gets drilled, and then whether it starts selling gas so everyone starts to get some ongoing revenue out of it.



There are a lot of risks involved, but once the mineral owner leases, then most of the risk is upon the O& G company to do something with the cash outlay it just spent to obtain the drilling rights. We spend 3.5 or 4 MM to drill a horizontal, set pipe and cement, then multi-stage frac the horizontal leg and then hope no mechanical problems arise like getting stuck in the hole, or geologic problems like a fault in the shale that simply "drinks" the cement and will never take a good cement job 6500 feet below the surface, ruins the whole expenditure. The public companies sell stock and if this happens they move to the next location and use some more stockholders money to drill in other locations. The landowner keeps his lease money, but that acreage is probably history to get another well drilled upon.

Having some seismic helps detect the faults before a horizontal leg is drilled across the acreage. Still Murphy's law always exists.

Let me know how much acreage you are in touch with, as all kinds of concessions can be made.

At the peak in late 2008 we sold out to public company symbol XTO, Cross Timers, all our Barnett Shale producing horizontals, and undrilled acreage. The total price was 800M. Not a Billion, but close.
My partners and I have watched , Chesapeake and other majors along with minors like East try and sow up acreage. Thats fine. If we move, we like to have contiguous acreage and the landowners can just take the lease money and royalty interest, and they can have the added option to participate in the production or ultimate sale if they elect to.