EnerVest CEO makes big bet on first-of-its-kind fracking

Close to half of HighMount's roughly 400 total jobs will be cut, including about 100 at HighMount's Houston office, which will close, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. EnerVest also is closing HighMount's primary Oklahoma City operations.

"In Sonora, we’re absorbing not everyone, but probably 85 percent of the folks. We’re just going to have a different management team. It’s previously run out of Oklahoma City by HighMount, so we didn’t keep those folks," Walker said. "In HighMount, we’re not getting everyone from Oklahoma City we’d like to have hired because they didn’t want to leave Oklahoma City. We’re getting some accounting and legal and IT help from the Houston area, and we’re keeping most of their staff in Sonora."

But Walker said EnerVest's biggest bet and most potential is finding oil in the gas-producing Utica Shale, which is in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and West Virginia. Walker is banking on using natural gas liquids, not water, in the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to draw out the oil.

"We still have a little over 800,000 net acres in what’s turning out to be a very big play," Walker said. "Everybody’s kind of written off the oil window in the Utica, but we think it’s just being completed the wrong way. It’s an extremely dry shale. It’s less than 5 percent water saturation. We spudded a well about three weeks ago, and we’re going to do a liquid butane frac. So we’re not going to introduce any water into the formation, which we think is creating a permeability barrier when you introduce water into it.

"It will be first liquid butane frac in that area — and maybe in the United States," Walker said. "If that works, it could open up a very big area. It’d be akin to the oil window of the Eagle Ford. So it’s probably our most upside and the thing that I do my daily prayers over. But I’ll have to caution that every time we really need something to … happen, I don’t think in my life it’s ever happened (laughs)."

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Jordan Blum covers energy for the Houston Business Journal. Read the top Texas energy news in our free weekly newsletter, Energy Inc. Click here to subscribe to the Energy Inc. newsletter.