HOUSTON -(Dow Jones)- Petrohawk Energy Corp. (HK) swung to a first-quarter loss absent a large prior-year gain on natural gas derivatives, while the oil and gas producer on Thursday disclosed an $855 million sale of its stake in a joint venture with Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP (KMP).
Petrohawk agreed to sell its 50% stake in KinderHawk Field Services, a natural gas service provider in Louisiana's Haynesville Shale field, to partner Kinder Morgan. Kinder Morgan also acquired a 25% stake in Petrohawk's gas-gathering and treatment business in the Eagle Ford Shale field in south Texas and agreed to assume $65 million debt.
The sale, along with an earlier $75 million sale of pipelines serving Arkansas' Fayetteville Shale field, brings Petrohawk's total divestiture this year to about a $1 billion.
Those proceeds, paired with a recent debt offering, will help the company plug a $1.6 billion gap in its 2011 spending plan, the Houston producer will still probably need to borrow $200 million from its credit line to completely fund its capital program, said Jefferies & Co. analyst Subash Chandra.
Meanwhile, the company said Thursday it had acquired or committed to acquire about 325,000 net acres in Texas' oil-rich Permian Basin at an average cost of about $1,400 an acre, the result of an effort it began in the second half of 2010. Earnings have improved for the natural-gas producer, but the company has set a goal to shift capital from areas yielding lower-priced natural gas to assets with more oil and condensates, the prices of which have climbed in recent months.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
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