In northwest La., natural gas is gold

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“I don’t think this area has ever seen anything like this — this is just phenomenal,” said Lasseigne, who’s chairman of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association and president of Bossier City-based TMR Exploration Inc., which owns 11 drilling rigs.

Chesapeake, by comparison, owns 150 rigs and, despite heavy drilling in the Barnett Shale natural gas formation in and around Fort Worth, Texas, expects to have 30 rigs running in the Shreveport area by the end of 2009.

It now has five there.

No one truly knows where the Haynesville Shale trend will lead, not even Chesapeake. But the company is incredibly bullish on the region. It already has locked up 500,000 acres in lease commitments.

Other companies negotiating leases in the area include Petrohawk Energy Corp., Goodrich Petroleum Corp., EnCana Corp., Devon Energy Corp. and Andarko Petroleum Corp. Chesapeake, though, began working the natural gas play more than two years ago and got a head start.

While acknowledging its leasehold numbers and drilling plans, publicly traded Chesapeake is playing it coy about the scope of natural gas reserves it expects to find and the length of time it will generate booming exploration activity in the Shreveport area.

Jeff Mobley, a senior vice president for Chesapeake, describes the Haynesville Shale potential by pointing to the Barnett Shale in Texas, where Chesapeake is the No. 2 producer behind Devon and where it began drilling in 2004.

Chesapeake has leased 260,000 Barnett Shale acres, where it’s producing 600 million cubic feet of natural gas daily — 430 million cubic feet it gets to keep for itself and the remainder to royalty owners.

“What we’ve said is the (Haynesville) play could potentially be more important to us than any other play that we’ve participated in to date,” Mobley said.

That’s tall talk for the third-largest U.S. producer of natural gas.

What’s amazing about the Haynesville phenomenon, Lasseigne said, is the speed with which it’s moving.

“We’ve watched them jump from $200 an acre at the beginning of the year to an average of $10,000 an acre,” he said, “and there are instances where we’ve seen $15,000 an acre. I don’t know that it’s in the downturn yet.

“The companies buying leases, the brokers working for those companies, are still adding personnel because they can’t get to everything. There’s a lot of unleased acres still within the city limits.”