Out Fox The $treet

As natural gas prices soar this year, Chesapeake Energy ( CHK ) is likely the biggest beneficiary. The heavily indebted, asset rich firm will make out like a bandit if natural gas prices triple as Jeremy Grantham suggested earlier this month. As Chesapeake was its own worst enemy with an aggressive land acquisition and drilling plan over the last decade, the company might become its own best friend with a scaled back capital spending plan. After a decade of rapid growth, Chesapeake turned into the largest independent producer of natural gas and a leading landholder in the vast majority of the important shale areas. The company has a leasehold on 15M net acres and has a reserve base of nearly 20 Tcfe. Read the full article at Seeking Alpha. Disclosure: No positions mentioned. Please review the disclaimer page for more details. 

With the surprise retiring of Chesapeake ( CHK ) CEO Aubrey McClendon a few weeks back, will investors benefit from the company shifting towards a more disciplined strategy? Or will the company remain on the same collision course with debtors? The company is the second-largest producer of natural gas, a top 15 producer of oil and natural gas liquids, and the most active driller of new wells in the United States. The company's operations are focused on discovering and developing unconventional natural gas and oil fields onshore with leading positions in the Eagle Ford, Utica, Granite Wash, and Mississippi Lime unconventional liquids plays and in the Marcellus, Haynesville, and Barnett unconventional natural gas shale plays. While most investors don't doubt that Chesapeake owns the largest domestic oil and natural gas resource base, the question exists as to whether shareholders will reap the value of those resources due to a huge debt load. Read the full...

Part I of this series focused on the continual reduction of rigs exploring for natural gas in the domestic U.S. lower 48. All the while, commodity prices continue to surge upward with futures prices even higher. This second part will focus on the natural gas producers that will benefit from the surging prices and the potential that a great majority of the rigs needed to increase production are tied up with oil drilling. As mentioned in Part I, the Baker Hughes (BHI) rig report on Friday showed an interesting divergence with the commodity markets. While natural gas has jumped some 60% in the past few months, the amount of rigs drilling for natural gas has plunged to lows not seen since 1999. In the last week, the natural gas rig count dropped another 15 to only 422. Last year, the count was 936. Recently Forbes released an article describing the depletion curve in the Eagle Ford as higher than expected. Not only does this change the investment thesis on some of the shale plays, but it ...