The company set aside just 8% of its 2021 budget for South Texas, while 85% of the total $650 million was earmarked for gas-rich plays in the Appalachian basin in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio as well as the Gulf Coast.Īlmost two-thirds of its fourth-quarter production of around 435,000 boepd was natural gas. The Oklahoma City-based company was saddled with more than $9 billion debt and filed for bankruptcy last year amid the pandemic-driven oil price collapse. The cut amounts to about 15 of Chesapeake's current workforce, which numbers about 1,500. Lawler, who will leave at the end of April, took over eight years ago from billionaire founder Aubrey McClendon amid an antitrust probe in 2013 and had unsuccessfully tried to pivot Chesapeake's focus away from natural gas to oil. Employees were notified of the planned job cuts in an email sent Thursday afternoon. Offloading the South Texas acreage would mean shifting focus back to natural gas, a strategic reversal outlined by Lawler in an interview in February with Reuters. 'Given that Eagle Ford deals have mostly had private equity buyers in recent years, this could set up to be one of the bigger acquisitions by a private equity-sponsored producer,' Andrew Dittmar, an M&A analyst at Enverus, said.

Chk layoffs