James Palm
Analyst · RBC Capital.
Well, in the last call, we've talked about Utica and gave some formulas. They seem to be holding up pretty well. In general, if you have -- of course it has to do with the lateral length and so forth that makes a difference in the cost for a lot of reasons. But I think, if you'll take the lateral length, if it is an 8,000-foot well, figure $1,200 per foot. And if you think -- if it's a 5,000-foot lateral, figure about $1,500 per foot. And of course we're in the science stage. We're having to drill strat tests and we even cored the first well. So there's a couple of extra cost that we're getting early on, but things are simplifying. And those numbers seem to be settling out real well going forward. We're making AFEs as we're looking to the cost we had, send them on to our partners with proposed locations, and everything is coming down in costs. We got there -- we were really fortunate again to be there as things slowed down in the Marcellus. Because a year ago, we really anticipated problems getting rigs and getting frac crews and so forth. And we have had some really competitive bids on our frac job, which is a big part of the deal. And it's a good time to be completing wells up there. So I would say, long range, on that 8,000-foot lateral, look for about $1,000 a foot; on that 5000-foot lateral, look for about $1,200 a foot as we get past this stage where we have to drill strat tests and log it as we get -- we were 6 miles away from the nearest electric log from where we drilled the Wagner so we have to do that. And the same thing has gone on the last 2. But by the end of the year, we'll have other people offsetting this, and we'll have our own offsets, and that's really going to cheapen up those wells.