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Deep beneath the pine forests of East Texas sits a layer of rock the oil and gas industry long treated as too hot, too deep, and too costly to bother with. That layer, part of a region geologists now call the Western Haynesville, has quietly become one of the most talked-about natural gas frontiers in the country. A small Tulsa company has just planted a flag in it, and it did so in an unusual way. Rather than drill a brand new well, it went back down an old one.
Empire Petroleum Corporation (NYSE American: EP) said it had re-entered a well in Madison County that was first drilled in 1959. The well, called the Wakefield-Harrison GU B #1, was cleaned out and widened all the way to 21,006 feet. The company reports that the field around it had only ever been developed to roughly 10,000 feet, so the work exposed close to 11,000 feet of rock that had never been properly studied.
To understand why that matters, it helps to know what the crew actually did at the bottom. They ran what is called an open-hole logging suite, a set of instruments lowered into the bare rock to measure its properties, and they cut sidewall cores, which are small physical samples of the formation. Getting clean readings and intact samples at that depth is hard, in part because of the heat. Empire says temperatures reached 434 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to cook the electronics that many tools rely on. Independent coverage of the play describes reservoirs sitting at true vertical depths of about 17,000 feet or deeper, with bottom hole temperatures above 425 degrees, so Empire’s numbers line up with what the region is known for.
The competitive angle is where this gets interesting. The Western Haynesville has been opened up mainly by larger operators. Comstock Resources, Inc. (NYSE: CRK) is the acknowledged leader, and it has been joined by Expand Energy Corporation (NASDAQ: EXE), Japan’s Mitsui, privately held Hilcorp Energy, and Adamas Energy, the operator formerly known as Aethon Energy. Empire says its re-entry reached a true vertical depth of 20,949 feet, which it calculates to be about 1,713 feet deeper than a Comstock well and about 2,398 feet deeper than an Expand pilot well. Those depth comparisons come from Empire, so they are worth reading as the company’s own claim rather than settled fact.
The money is the part a general reader will notice. Empire pegs its cost at roughly $4.4 million because it reused a wellbore that was never plugged and sealed off. It contrasts that with what it describes as new ultra-deep wells in the area costing between $30 million and $45 million each. That gap is real, though the figure deserves a footnote. Independent reporting suggests that drilling and completion costs for these mega-wells have been falling toward $27 million as operators improve their methods, so the high-end Empire cites reflects the pricier past more than the current trend. Either way, spending a few million to gather modern data at record depth is a very different bet from drilling a new well.
What Empire gets out of this is information. The logs and cores let it sharpen its existing three-dimensional seismic imaging, and the company plans to deepen two more wells to build a fuller picture across its acreage. It has laid out a plan to work the field in two broad zones, a shallower set and a deeper set, moving from simple recompletions toward eventual deep-gas production. Empire also owns the pipelines and compression needed to move any gas it produces, which matters where market access has been a bottleneck.
None of this guarantees a payoff. Empire still has to turn data into producing wells, and natural gas prices will decide whether the deeper targets are worth chasing. What the company has bought for its $4.4 million is a cheaper seat at a table where its neighbors are paying far more, and a set of readings from a depth that, by its own account, no other public operator in this stretch of the play has matched.
