Miles Jay Allison
Analyst · BMO Capital Market.
Well, again, I'd comment. I think natural gas fundamentals right now are -- of course, I wouldn't think they're probably better than oil. I mean oil is $90, $95 and natural gases are going from $204 a year ago to $40 or $50. I think what you're seeing is you're seeing companies be realistic about all the acreage that they've leased, I mean, the Southwestern Delaware bought 162,000 acres or whatever it was, maybe 2 million cubic feet of gas per day for $90-something million. I mean, so $500 an acre, they're really just buying production and paying a little bit for the leases. I think that there's going to be a Tier 1, 2 and 3 in all these major plays, whether it's the Haynesville, the Bossier, the Barnett, the Marcellus. You can call it super rich or whatever, but there's going to be a Tier 1, 2, 3, I don't think you're going to have a fault in this that we had in '08, '09, '10 where people make big bets on leases, and you had to drill them also and you have a recession. When you have a lot of foreign JV partners, I don't think -- when gas gets back in the $5-plus range, some of the true Tier 1 acreage will be very valuable. And I think we're starting to see a little shift toward that. Although the rig count, if you look at -- the rig count, it's kind of interesting if you do your research, but the rig count is at a 14-year low right now in April 2013. But if you go back a year ago, natural gas in 2012 in the month of April was at a 14-year low. It took the rigs another year to hit that number. But now, this month in 2013, I mean, gas is at a 2-year high. So I think you're seeing a tight turn, but I don't think you're seeing any craziness out there, and I don't think you'll see it. I mean, the rig count from natural gas rigs went down last week by 13, 14 rigs or whatever. And I think that's where we're kind of the barometer out there, we're saying we've got a Tier 1 dry gas play in Haynesville/Bossier, and that goes from 0 production to, what, $7 billion a day in like 4 years. So we're still not putting any rigs in there to drill our wells because we base it -- the capital dollars that we spend, we'll base it upon whatever RoR would be, and right now, we have better places to put those dollars.