aussiehalo, There is still some value here, the question is how...

aussiehalo,

There is still some value here, the question is how much value?

If everyone took a step back and thought about things.

I'd say when Antares was being offered $300M for all 3 projects that was near the peak for oil & gas prices in the last boom cycle.

Since then they sold Southern Star for @ $125M (which I actually thought was a little on the light side) [yes the headline number was $134 but that was at an inflated price for those Breitburn shares].

At that time they had 25,000 acres in NS & BS, they were renewing some of the leases at not that high a price (maybe $1,000 a acre).

SS was in the heart of the play Permian play, NS & BS are on the margins of it. 12 non commercial wells from 13 drilled at way more than the advertised cost's should have been ringing alarm bells in everyone's head, it wasn't.

If they were in sought after locations some of the other players would have come along and "top leased them" in effect offering the landowner a better price for those leases once the original lease term agreement with Antares expired.

So for someone to come along and offer $250M for just 20,000 acres when the market is entering a big down turn, was surprising.

Yet as time went on, Antares was still shedding leases and buying some new ones. If a buyer was prepared to pay Antares over $10,000 an acre, why was it not out there outbidding them for the leases that were not currently owned? I mean they could have bought them for $2,000 an acre and saved lots of $$$

I'm not saying it won't happen, but too many things just don't feel right with it, don't make sense to me.

As to what the leases might be worth' I'd say that's really hard to answer in the current market, maybe someone will see them as strategic, or has found a key to unlocking the oil & gas that Antares hasn't been able to. However its a buyers market now, not a sellers.

Antares chose not to drill other wells, kept hinting it was going to do it, but never did & I don't honestly think it ever was going to spend the $$$ doing it. They wanted to ride on the coat tails of others working in the area, rather than coming up with more duff wells.

They told us they'd cracked it when they got that one good result, the next 3 were crap, the ones that caused them to stop the shareholder approved sale, because things were supposedly so bright, but weren't.

LOTM