With the Southwest Anderson and Houston County mystery solved for the most part with Expand and Mitusi being the major players (and we will see if another one shows up or not), I’m wanting to bring the mystery of the Key and East Texas Energy leases back up to topic…I visited with a local geologist at lunch earlier in the week and he discussed how its most likely a deep bossier play, a lot like the Anderson/Houston/Freestone/Leon/Robertson. He was a bit baffled due to a lack of info available for the Bossier formation in the area, but that was his best educated guess. I feel like this forum’s community was very good and knowledgable about sniffing out Expand, and is very close to sniffing out the company behind this mystery. I would love to hear everyone’s guess.
I believe it is Expand.
As I’ve previously stated, im going with EOG
Questions:? Why would major companies hire lease brokers to offer less than 1/3 the bonus than they had previously leased for, less royalty and abusive lease terms to mineral owners when there are many mineral buyers offering up to $10,000 plus for the mineral rights in the same area’s? I believe it is “leaking” inside within these companies and lease broker’s landmen also “leaking”. The “in house” land departments are not monitoring their lease brokers dealings with running title and promptly dealing with the mineral owners. Very poor management!
Our family has not seen any offers anywhere close to a $10,000 number in this area. We have not sold anything ever, but it would certainly be tempting at that number! I think we are all assuming these Key and East Tx Energy leases have a big operator behind them, but there is always a chance there isn’t and it’s someone just out speculating, hence the lower numbers.
All that being said, I believe there is a larger operator behind it all, but just saying there is a decent chance there isn’t too.
There are lot more prospects at shallower depths that could be productive with horizontal drilling at the current time also. It’s also a possible liquids play as well as Natural Gas. Such as the Glenrose and the Buda formations. There are a lot of oil guys around Tyler and the Longview area. Wishful Thinking maybe?
I hope you are right, but I’m 99% sure this is a part of the deep bossier extension.
I’ve received a bit more info from a friend who supposedly knows a representative of the parent company of Key. He was told that they have not sold the acreage to anyone and are still looking for a buyer and hence why they extended the acreage. Also, I don’t believe they extended or plan to extend all the leases, just certain ones to help with the cost as they search for a buyer.
It seems highly unlikely to me that Key and East Texas have done this on their own. They wrote two-year seismic options on at least 55,000 acres, and converted more than 90% of those options into leases, and they have been extending leases that reached the end of the primary term.
Where did they get the money to do all this? I assume seismic work was done, and there is significant cost associated with doing all the title work. Regarding bonuses, every $100 of bonus on 55,000 acres costs $5.5 million. I would assume bonuses averaged at least $300, so that would be $16.5 million plus the cost of the seismic work and the title work.
Total cost to date could be $20 million. Where did they get that kind of money?
Hope fully we will get an answer sometime this year.
I don’t believe seismic was ever shot, and limiting the number of leases that they extend will reduce the cost obviously.
EOG had a company that was going to seismo graphing the part of of ranch along the river in 2015. But after all the overflows that year they never done it. The guy said they were working Houston County and wanted to do property that wasn’t tied up in Alabama Ferry Field. They paid us to do it but never done it.
It appears Key is now leasing interest that has previously expired, along with extending the leases that have extension language in them.