A Denver firm has completed its acquisition of about 90 oil wells in the San Juan Basin in northern New Mexico.
In October, Encana Corp. announced it would sell its assets in the basin for $480 million to Denver-based DJR Energy. The companies announced Thursday that the sale was completed.
“The addition of Encana’s 182,000 net acres gives DJR Energy the largest position in the core of the oil window in the San Juan Basin with over 350,000 acres and will allow DJR Energy to produce approximately 7,000 barrels of oil a day,” company spokeswoman Allison Devaney wrote in an email.
DJR Energy currently operates 800 vertical oil wells on 350,000 acres on the southern rim of the San Juan Basin in San Juan County, New Mexico. It has more than 1,000 drilling locations, producing about 7,000 barrels of oil a day. The purchase of Encana assets will add 90 horizontal oil wells that use hydraulic fracturing to DJR’s existing operation, Jeff King, DJR chief financial officer, said in a previous interview. Horizontal wells that use fracking are more productive than older vertical wells, the spokesman said.
DJR is a private exploration and production oil and natural gas company formed in April 2017 by Dave Lehman, a former executive with Exxon Mobil Corp.
King previously said DJR has 12 employees in its Denver headquarters and about 40 employees in its Aztec field office. DJR will likely add Encana’s nine employees operating in the San Juan Basin to its field staff, he said.
“We look forward to continuing to unlock the potential of the southern San Juan Basin and believe DJR is well-positioned as the dominant player in the oil window,” Lehman said in a prepared statement Friday. “Our team has done an excellent job of preparing for the transition and we look forward to commencing drilling operations,”
The San Juan Basin is a natural gas and oil field that spans northern New Mexico and Southwest Colorado.
Discovered in the early 1920s, the San Juan Basin is one of the oldest producing areas in the U.S., but the field didn’t flourish until the 1990s. Now, there are more than 30,000 wells, most of them producing natural gas, in the basin.
But production has waned since the mid-2000s, largely attributed to lower global natural gas prices from increased production across the country.
jromeo@durangoherald.com
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