Further to this and so many similarities I could draw to where Helios is at as compared to PetroHawk back in the early days of Eagle Ford before it ultimately was taken over for $15bn USD.
When Petrohawk Energy Corp. announced a decade ago that it had made two big shale gas wells in South Texas, everything changed.
Companies poured into the region. They deployed hordes of landmen to tiny county courthouses to comb through mineral records. They spent billions to lease acreage and develop what would become the Eagle Ford Shale, which stretches 400 miles from the Bryan-College Station area to Laredo, and is now the second largest oil producing and fifth largest natural gas producing region in the U.S.
The field ultimately helped reshape the global energy market and upend world geopolitics— but first, it upended South Texas.
or Floyd Wilson, then-president and CEO of Petrowhawk, the Oct. 21, 2008 announcement was a coup accomplished through stealthy buying of acreage under pseudonyms and keeping reports to the state under wraps until the last moment.
“We didn’t tell anybody,” Wilson said. “So we started leasing land, we started with maybe 30,000, 40,000 acres and pretty soon we had probably 300,000 acres. By that time word was out, we made some announcements in 2008 and the land rush started in the Eagle Ford.”
Oil and gas drilling permits skyrocketed from 26 in 2008 to 1,010 in 2010, hitting a peak of 5,613 in 2014, according to the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry in Texas.
Oil production in the Eagle Ford grew from less than 60,000 barrels a day in October 2008 to a peak of 1.72 million barrels a day in March 2015. Natural gas production expanded from 1.68 billion cubic feet a day to 7.42 billion cubic feet, according to data from the Department of Energy.
It wasn’t the first shale rush Wilson had started. Petrohawk drilled previously in the Haynesville, a natural gas field in East Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. It was there that the company got a feel for combining horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing, the process of pumping high volumes of water, chemicals and sand underground to crack shale rock and extract oil and natural gas.
As a shale pioneer, Petrohawk became a target — and Wilson one of the biggest winners to emerge from the Eagle Ford boom. Australian mining company BHP Billiton snapped up Petrohawk in a deal worth $15.1 billion, including debt. Wilson now heads the Permian-focused, Houston-based Halcón Resource Corp.
https://www.expressnews.com/busines...upended-South-Texas-10-years-ago-13320692.php
