The Houston oil and gas company Magnum Hunter Resources is moving back to the Dallas-Fort Worth area — sort of.
The company said that after selling off its assets in South Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale last year it began scouting a move to D-FW to cut administrative and travel costs.
Magnum already housed its accounting operations in North Texas.
“Because our future growth potential is focused primarily in the Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale in West Virginia and Ohio, there is no longer any strategic reason to maintain both a corporate office in Houston and accounting department offices in the Dallas area,” CEO Gary Evans said in a prepared statement Thursday.
Evans attended SMU and sits on the board of the university’s Maguire Energy Institute.
Magnum Hunter is looking for property in the Las Colinas area and plans to move by year’s end. The headquarters office will house about 85 workers — 60 from its accounting office in Grapevine and another 25 from Houston.
If the name Magnum Hunter sounds familiar, its because Evans was CEO of an Irving-based company bearing the same name for about two decades. He sold to Denver-based Cimarex for $2.2 billion in 2006. Three years later, once a noncompete clause ran out, Evans bought a small Houston oil company and renamed it Magnum Hunter Resources, according to a company spokesman.
Magnum Hunter’s production totaled almost 10,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day last year. It reported $223.1 million in losses last year, on $280.4 million in revenues.
Its stock closed at $5.80 on Thursday, up more than 40 percent over the last 12 months.
Follow James Osborne on Twitter at @osborneja.
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