It seems that not a day goes by without some news out of the smoking-hot Haynesville shale. The news flow is downright torrid for such an early-stage natural gas play. Of course, few investors had heard of companies like Goodrich Petroleum
The most typical Haynesville announcement consists of a company updating its acreage position and/or resource potential in the play. Forest Oil
The Denver-based E&P reported some dreamy figures -- 90,000 net acres with unrisked potential of five trillion cubic feet of gas. This is a far cry from three months ago, when the company was merely saying "we may have opportunities in the Bossier / Haynesville Shale." This amount of gas -- five "T's" in oil-patch parlance -- is the energy equivalent of more than 800 million barrels of oil. Yeah, that looks like an opportunity, all right.
On Monday, Petrohawk Energy
Petrohawk just completed and production-tested its very first horizontal Haynesville well. With a horizontal well, you drill horizontally to hit the gas contained in a laterally extensive formation. Petrohawk drilled this particular well down 11,000 feet, and then nearly 4,000 feet laterally. To better coax the gas out of the rock, the company also induced fractures at eleven separate intervals.
The grand result of all this effort was a monster well, flowing at a rate of 16.8 million cubic feet per day. That beats reported results from both Penn Virginia
Despite its multibagger run this year, Goodrich earns only a three-star rating from Motley Fool CAPS players. Are they missing the boat, or rightfully skeptical? Join the conversation right here.