Chesapeake Struggling?

[DTowner]

I don't "hate" the Thunder, but have no interest in the NBA in general or the Thunder in particular.  However, it seems clear the Thunder have been good for Oklahoma in general, although OKC is obviously the primary beneficiary.

OKC has many advantages over Tulsa that will never change.  It is the State Capitol with all the benefits that confers on it; it is intersected by 3 interstate highways (2 of which are "free"), it is located a short drive from the state's largest university, it has a major military based in an adjacent town, and it has much more room to grow and fill in.

While I think Tulsa is a better city than OKC in many ways (I've visited OKC many times, but have never lived there), Tulsans need to be careful about blinding ignoring the strides OKC has made and its many successes over the past decade.  OKC is not just bigger than Tulsa, it continues to grow at a faster pace.  McClendon may have his problems right now, but he and other OKC businessmen are working very hard and spending a lot of money to make OKC a top tier city.  The Thunder is only the most obvious manifestation of the risk that Tulsa is falling further and further behind OKC in size and perception.

[Teatownclown]

A major difference between OKsh!tty and Teatown is OKsh!tty has no class:

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nba-ball-dont-lie/let-hate-oklahoma-city-thunder-shirts-needless-shot-150253091.html

[Teatownclown]

Multiple people shot downtown after Oklahoma City Thunder game


http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=12&articleid=20120522_12_0_Aesihe260188

Open carry's a real deterrent. And OKsh!tty may not deserve the Thunder in the eyes of the World and Nation.

[Conan71]

Multiple people shot downtown after Oklahoma City Thunder game


http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=12&articleid=20120522_12_0_Aesihe260188

Open carry's a real deterrent. And OKsh!tty may not deserve the Thunder in the eyes of the World and Nation.

Considering the shooting doesn’t appear to be related to the Thunder win, I don’t see how the world and nation would think OKC is undeserving.

Open carry isn’t in effect until Nov. 1 so not sure what point you are trying to make there.  Are you going to go all cowboy on us after Nov. 1? 

[heironymouspasparagus]

Multiple people shot downtown after Oklahoma City Thunder game


http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=12&articleid=20120522_12_0_Aesihe260188

Open carry's a real deterrent. And OKsh!tty may not deserve the Thunder in the eyes of the World and Nation.

Your connection is nebulous.  Like the 8 ball says - Try Again Later.

[DTowner]

Considering the shooting doesn’t appear to be related to the Thunder win, I don’t see how the world and nation would think OKC is undeserving.

Open carry isn’t in effect until Nov. 1 so not sure what point you are trying to make there.  Are you going to go all cowboy on us after Nov. 1? 

Don't fans in all top tier cities go wilding after a big sports victory?  Maybe this should be taken as a good sign.

[rdj]

OKC just wants to be like Vancouver.  The city all urban planners love!

[Teatownclown]

The Oligarchy's Rule of Law: From Russia to Oklahoma

http://truth-out.org/news/item/9409-the-oligarchys-rule-of-law-from-russian-to-oklahoma

At the end of the 1990s, after the total collapse of the mass-privatization experiment in Boris Yeltin's Russia, some of the more earnest free-market proselytizers tried making sense of it all. The unprecedented collapse of Russia's economy and its capital markets, the wholesale looting, the quiet extermination of millions of Russians from the shock and destitution (Russian male life expectancy plummeted from 68 years to 56 years)—the terrible consequences of imposing radical libertarian free-market ideas on an alien culture—turned out worse than any worst-case-scenario imagined by the free-market true-believers.
Of all the disastrous results of that experiment, what troubled many Western free-market true-believers most wasn't so much the mass poverty and population collapse, but rather, the way things turned out so badly in Russia's newly-privatized companies and industries. That was the one thing that was supposed to go right. According to the operative theory—developed by the founding fathers of libertarianism/neoliberalism, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and the rest—a privately-owned company will always outperform a state-run company because private ownership and the profit-motive incentivize the owners to make their companies stronger, more efficient, more competitive, and so on. The theory promises that everyone benefits except for the bad old state and the lazy.
That was the dominant libertarian theory framing the whole "shock doctrine" privatization experiment in Russia and elsewhere. In reality, as everyone was forced to admit by 1999, Russia's privatized companies were stripped and plundered as fast as their new private owners could loot them, leaving millions of workers without salaries, and most of Russia's industry in far worse shape than the Communists left it.
Most of the free-market proselytizers—ranging from Clinton neoliberal Michael McFaul (currently Obama's ambassador to Moscow) to libertarian Pinochet fanboy Andrei Illarionov (currently with the Cato Institute)– blamed everything but free-market experiments for Russia's collapse.
But some of the more earnest believers whose libertarian faith was shaken by what happened to Corporate Russia needed something more sophisticated than a crude historical whitewash.
Lucky for them, Milton Friedman provided the answer to a Cato Institute interviewer: Russia lacked "rule of law"—another neoliberal/libertarian catchphrase that went mainstream in the late 80s. Without "rule of law," Friedman and the rest of the free-market faithful argued, privatization was bound to fail. Here's Friedman's answer in the Cato Institute's 2002 Economic Freedom of the World Report:
CATO: If we reflect upon the fall of communism and the transition from the centrally planned economy to a market economy, what have we learned in the last decade of the importance of economic freedom and other institutions that may be necessary to support economic freedom?
MILTON FRIEDMAN: We have learned about the importance of private property and the rule of law as a basis for economic freedom. Just after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, I used to be asked a lot: "What do these ex-communist states have to do in order to become market economies?" And I used to say: "You can describe that in three words: privatize, privatize, privatize." But, I was wrong. That wasn't enough. The example of Russia shows that. Russia privatized but in a way that created private monopolies-private centralized economic controls that replaced government's centralized controls. It turns out that the rule of law is probably more basic than privatization. Privatization is meaningless if you don't have the rule of law. What does it mean to privatize if you do not have security of property, if you can't use your property as you want to?
Others expanded on Friedman's rationalization, arguing that without this "rule of law" to protect their private property, the new private owners of Russia's industries were incentivized to plunder their companies as quickly as possible for fear that the state would steal their companies back. Of course, all this rationalizing was undermined by fact that Russia's oligarchs stole their companies in the first place, and thieves do tend to steal what they've stolen. But never mind—the libertarian ideology was salvaged, as Russia's privatization experiment was declared "not a real free-market" without Friedrich Hayek's "rule of law" in place.
The reason I'm bringing this up now is because over the past month, one of America's most rapacious oligarchs, Aubrey McClendon, was exposed by Reuters for plundering Chesapeake Energy, the second-largest natural gas producer in the country after Exxon-Mobil. McClendon, co-founder, CEO and until a few weeks ago Chairman of Chesapeake, was discovered running a hedge fund inside of Chesapeake, personally profiting on the side from large trading positions that his public company Chesapeake took in the gas and oil markets.
Reuters also discovered that McClendon took small personal stakes in natural gas wells bought by Chesapeake, then borrowed against the wells' reserves from the same banks that Chesapeake borrowed from—basically, the banks kicked back sweet lending deals to McClendon on the side as McClendon arranged less-than-sweet loans to his publicly-owned company, Chesapeake, kicking profits from Chesapeake's shareholders and employees' pockets into the banks and into Aubrey's accounts.
The loser in all this, as always: Employees, retirees, and shareholders. As Reuters reported, Chespeake is one of a small handful of companies whose employee 401k retirement packages consist mostly of Chesapeake stock, and the company requires employees to hold on to their stock for the maximum amount of time allowed by law:
Thousands of Chesapeake workers have retirement portfolios that are heavily invested in Chesapeake stock, which has declined sharply following revelations about Chief Executive Aubrey K. McClendon's business dealings.
But while retail and institutional investors have sold the stock, employees don't always have that option.
It's not the first time McClendon has been caught plundering Chesapeake at the expense of shareholders, pension fund investors and employees: In 2008, McClendon bet and lost about $2 billion worth of Chesapeake Energy stock he owned—94% of Aubrey's personal stake in Chesapeake– on a margin call when natural gas prices collapsed. Aubrey bet that natural gas prices would continue soaring, you see.
But like his peers in the oligarchy class, Aubrey's loss became everyone but Aubrey's loss: He was awarded a "CEO bailout" by his board of directors, who honored Aubrey with a $75 million "bonus" to bring his total pay in 2008 to $112 million, making Aubrey McClendon the highest-paid CEO in Corporate America that year. Even though Chesapeake's earnings dropped in half, and its stock fell 60%, wiping out up to $33 billion in shareholder wealth.
Now, we're learning, Aubrey was profiting in other ways off of Chesapeake that same year.
There is so much more to hate about Aubrey McClendon than this—the millions McClendon poured into Gary Bauer's gay-bashing outfit "Americans United To Preserve Marriage" and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the role McClendon and his Whirlpool heiress wife played in stealing waterfront land from Benton Harbor, an African-American slum and the poorest city in Michigan, in order to expand an exclusive golf course country club for residents of St. Josephs, where McClendon owns several plots of land. McClendon's wife, Katie, is from St. Joseph's; so is Katie's cousin, Fred Upton, the Republican Congressman from St. Joseph's. Aubrey and his wife are what pass for royalty (sans noblesse oblige) these days: Katie from the Whirpool fortune, Aubrey an heir to the Kerr-McGee fortune. (If you've seen the movie Silkwood, you might remember Kerr-McGee as the company that iced the labor union activist played by Meryl Streep.)
This is just one of many stories about how publicly-traded companies have been and can be transformed into elaborate schemes to loot and steal from the public and enrich a tiny handful of oligarchs. We saw this in the 1980s when Reagan deregulated the Savings & Loans, which were quickly transformed into a means of looting, fraud and plunder; we saw it in the 2000s, after the de-regulation of the financial sector.
The problem goes much deeper than Milton Friedman's "rule of law" fetish. "Rule of law" is just another red herring diversion to provide cover for continued oligarchy plunder, failure and barbarism. The problem is systemic, and more importantly, ideological. We still operate under the same neoliberal/libertarian major premises we inherited from the Hayek-Mises-Friedman era, an ideology that considers notions like "the public good" to be quaint delusions at best—as opposed to today's still-dominant, still-standing foundational ideology, which says that freedom equals the ruthless pursuit of individual self-interest, the unlimited acquisition of private property and wealth, framed within a cold, dystopian "rule of law."
That is where the problem starts. That is why, every week, I could tell another story about another Aubrey McClendon or Dick Parsons, and it will never end until the ideology that enables them is buried.

Plundering and looting....

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z9h2nO5SIo[/youtube]

[Conan71]

CHK in the news again.  Sorry for the long citation, but in case you are already at your paywall limit:

Chesapeake's fall threatens to spark a real estate fire sale

By JOHN HELYAR and DAVID WETHE Bloomberg News
Published: 7/12/2012  1:03 PM
Last Modified: 7/12/2012  1:03 PM

Chesapeake Energy Corp., whose $805 million investment in Oklahoma City’s land and buildings has helped reduce commercial real estate vacancies, threatens to collapse the market as it faces a cash squeeze and seeks to sell assets.

The second-largest U.S. natural-gas producer has spent $448.7 million to build a 120-acre (50-hectare) headquarters campus in the northwestern part of the city and an additional $356.7 million to develop three nearby retail centers and buy office buildings and more land, according to Peter Brzycki, a former Oklahoma City real estate broker who tracks the company’s properties.

While a sell-off of its commercial property may please the company’s investors, who have seen share prices decline as Chesapeake struggles to fill a cash-flow shortfall, a quick divestiture would also depress Oklahoma City’s office market, local real estate professionals said.

“If something were to happen to Chesapeake, the whole northwestern market would collapse,” said Don Karchmer, a local developer and investor who’s been involved with some of the company’s real estate activities. “The whole community has a fear of what could happen. It would be a huge hurt.”

Chesapeake, the second-largest private employer in Oklahoma City, is seeking to sell as much as $14 billion in assets in 2012 to raise cash.

The company fell 2.6 percent to $18.59 at 11:25 a.m. in New York. The shares have declined 17 percent this year as gas prices fell and after reports that Chief Executive Officer Aubrey McClendon was getting personal loans from companies that were also financing Chesapeake.
No Sale

The Oklahoma City properties aren’t part of Chesapeake’s planned divestiture program, said Michael Kehs, a company spokesman.

“We use our real estate every day, so it’s not for sale,” he said. Kehs said Brzycki’s tally of spending on Chesapeake’s campus was low and the figure for other real-estate development was high. He declined to comment on the total investment number.

Investors, including billionaire Carl Icahn, have called for the company to get rid of assets that aren’t central to its energy production business.

“You’ve got a cash crunch, and you’re not a real estate developer,” said David Dreman, chairman of Dreman Value Management Inc. in Jersey City, New Jersey, which controls about 1 million Chesapeake shares. “If I had a cash crunch and I had really good wells and very promising property, I don’t think I’d be in the restaurant business.”
Leading Recovery

Chesapeake’s real estate holdings include shopping centers and land on which a restaurant co-owned by McClendon operates.

In recent years, Chesapeake has helped to cushion Oklahoma City from the nation’s recession and tepid recovery. The city’s 4.5 percent unemployment rate was the lowest of any metropolitan area with a population over 1 million, according to a May survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Chesapeake had 5,000 local employees at the end of 2011, the city’s second-largest private employer after Integris Health.

The company has led a recovery of vacancy rates for top- tier office space in the city to “near pre-recession levels,” according to a report by broker Cushman & Wakefield Inc. The market’s 11.2 percent vacancy rate during the first three months of the year represents a 1.6 percentage point decline from a year earlier, it said. Less inventory has increased average Class A office rent to $21 a square foot.
Kerr-McGee Lessons

The $67 million Chesapeake spent to acquire three office buildings in the latter half of last year accounted for 75 percent of Oklahoma City’s total transactions in that real estate segment.

Now the company faces an estimated cash shortfall of $18.6 billion by the end of 2013, according to Alembic Global Advisors. Chesapeake has lost about $7 billion in market value in the past year amid falling energy prices and shareholder unrest about McClendon’s personal stakes -- and related debts -- in company wells. The board last month replaced McClendon as chairman and named four new directors.

Larkin Warner, a retired Oklahoma State University economics professor who lives near Chesapeake’s campus, recalls the departure of Kerr-McGee Corp., the Oklahoma energy company co-founded by McClendon’s great-uncle Robert Kerr that was bought by Houston-based Anadarko Petroleum Corp. in 2006.

“The day you begin to think the last few years are going to go on forever, that’s when you’re in trouble,” said Warner. For Kerr-McGee, “what happened was like the smile on the Cheshire Cat. It just gradually shrunk.”
Assessed Values

The company, which has leased 16 million acres of land nationally for drilling, has also been aggressive in its back yard, accumulating 3 million square feet of office space and paying top dollar for properties.

Chesapeake “routinely paid two to five times the current assessed value for virtually everything they acquired, and then added substantial construction costs on top of that,” said Brzycki, who has tracked 445 Chesapeake real estate purchases since 2005 using county and municipal records and who posts his findings on an okctalk.com forum.

Since 2005, the company has spent $152 million to acquire and upgrade office buildings away from its campus. Those 12 properties’ assessed value is now $106.2 million, according to municipal and county records. Chesapeake also put $152 million into development plans for three retail complexes, which now are 27 percent vacant and have an assessed value of $50.9 million.
Attracting Talent

While Oklahoma City commercial building valuations are based partly on comparable properties’ recent sales, according to the county assessor’s website, their assessed value doesn’t necessarily reflect market value.

Kehs said the main purpose of Chesapeake’s campus and adjacent retail development “is to create a work environment that is able to help us attract the best talent.” He declined to discuss the company’s real estate investment performance and said its office costs are lower than other large employers.

Chesapeake bought three tracts of land just south of its headquarters for $1.2 million in 2004. Within a year, it sold the parcels in two transactions for a total of $865,000, a 28 percent loss. The sale in part was in the form of a swap to add land to its campus.

Chesapeake spent $38.2 million in 2011 to buy an office building called Caliber Center, which had sold for $20.1 million four years earlier. The company’s $7 million purchase of an office building called Possum Creek in 2010 was two-and-a-half times what the property fetched five years earlier.
Nichols Hills

McClendon, who began his career as a land man buying up drilling rights, has been closely involved in Chesapeake’s real estate activities. He’s personally contacted owners of properties of interest to Chesapeake and sketched out plans to redevelop Nichols Hills Plaza on a paper napkin while lunching with then-tenant Robert Pemberton, owner of the Crescent Market.

That grocery store’s departure is one reason this effort hasn’t gone well with some residents and officials of Nichols Hills, an upscale suburb across the street from Chesapeake’s campus where McClendon and his wife and other prominent families reside.

After spending $66.5 million to purchase a variety of properties there, Chesapeake’s plans have been blocked by town officials concerned that a makeover of the retail center will cause shops to close for an extended period. The community of Nichols Hills counts on sales tax receipts from merchants for the majority of municipal revenue.
Whole Foods

The company also has met opposition from Nichols Hills Plaza patrons, some of whom staged a rally last October. The patrons were protesting the demise of two longstanding businesses, including Crescent Market. Pemberton, who said his family-owned business dates back to the Oklahoma land run in 1889, couldn’t compete with the new Whole Foods Market Inc. store in a Chesapeake-owned shopping center.

“Aubrey saw himself creating a new kind of market that Oklahoma City is ready for and there’s some logic to that, but it hasn’t worked out that way,” said Karchmer, the real estate developer who considers himself an admirer of McClendon.

For now, Chesapeake continues to expand its headquarters campus. Four construction tower cranes overlook eight new buildings and earthmoving equipment lays groundwork for more.

A 40-foot (12-meter) pile of dirt towers over the back yard of Charlie Maupin, a 63-year-old landscaper. Chesapeake has bought up scores of homes to expand its campus, and his could be next. The house, built with his hands, once looked out on trees. It now faces a clay-colored retention pond.

The landscaper said he’s gotten occasional calls from Chesapeake’s CEO asking if he’s ready to move.

Maupin expects to be compensated fairly by Chesapeake when he does move, and he thinks McClendon will turnaround the company. “He’s going to pull rabbits out of his hat for the next 10 years.”


Read more from this Tulsa World article at http://www.tulsaworld.com/business/article.aspx?subjectid=49&articleid=20120712_49_0_Chesap666526

[Teatownclown]

Thanks. It's about time you linked a worthwhile story...


Funny Money Part 2?

[dbacks fan]

CNBC has been discussing this for the last couple of months, and the future dosen't look good for the price of nat/gas.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/48142206

The cull has begun. Over the past month, 225 contracted landmen were cut from Chesapeake jobs, said one Ohio-based landman, who, like most in the close-knit industry, would only speak off the record.

"Chesapeake's activity level in the Appalachian region is minimal now. It has devastated the (landman) industry," the source said. "The Chesapeake debacle is one thing, but the rest of the industry shortfall is because a lot of the projects are intertwined with Chesapeake," he added.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/48129681

[nathanm]

Are all of these landmen new to the business? Isn't this what happens over and over and over again? I seem to remember a couple of boom bust cycles before I had even turned 18.

Also, dopey people in articles are dopey. Maybe they don't understand this, but land is central to Chesapeake's business, just like it is for every business based on natural resources. Owning surface land rather than mineral rights isn't exactly far afield for them. Owning a shopping center or restaurant, not really great (unless it's the company cafeteria). Owning the land under all the stuff near your corporate headquarters? That's called thinking ahead, something that the big investment firms don't seem to grasp.

[Townsend]

“Chesapeake Swings to 3rd-Quarter Loss”

http://stateimpact.npr.org/oklahoma/jp/chesapeake-swings-to-3rd-quarter-loss/

Chesapeake Energy posted a $2.01 billion loss in the third quarter. The Oklahoma City natural gas giant is struggling with low natural gas prices, growing debt and “weak cash flow,” the WSJ reports.

[nathanm]

Ah, leverage. Great when you're making money hand over fist. Not so great when the cash flow dries up.

[Townsend]

Chesapeake Energy selling Oklahoma acreage to Chinese company

http://tinyurl.com/adxdahs

Feb. 26--Chesapeake Energy Corp. on Monday took another step toward closing a multibillion dollar funding gap.

Chesapeake announced a $1.02 billion joint venture with Sinopec International Petroleum Exploration and Production Corp. for a stake in its acreage in northern Oklahoma's Mississippi Lime play.

Chesapeake will get the bulk of the money in cash when the deal closes.

Oppenheimer analyst Fadel Gheit said the deal is not structured like a typical joint venture, which usually includes less up-front cash and more money for future drilling costs, because of Chesapeake's budget woes.

"They need the cash today and not tomorrow," Gheit said. "To them, obviously time is critical."

Sinopec will buy an interest in half of Chesapeake's 850,000 net acres in the oil-rich Mississippi Lime, then share future exploration and development costs in the play.

"We are excited to announce the execution of our Mississippi Lime joint venture with Sinopec, which moves us further along in achieving our asset sales goals and secures an excellent partner to share the capital costs required to actively develop this very large, liquids-rich resource play," said Steven C. Dixon, Chesapeake's chief operating officer.

Chesapeake's Mississippi Lime acreage produced an average of 34,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day during the fourth quarter. The acreage has proved reserves of 140 million barrels of oil equivalent.

Chesapeake's stock slipped nearly 7 percent Monday, dipping $1.39 to $19.11, a performance Gheit said may have been indicative of expectations the company would get more money for its Mississippi Lime acreage.

Sinopec is no stranger to the area, having struck a $2.5 billion deal with Devon Energy Corp. in January 2012 that included acreage in the Mississippi Lime and four other resource plays.

Gheit said such deals allow Chinese oil companies to learn techniques needed to develop that country's abundant resources.

"I call it legalized industrial espionage," he said.

Chesapeake previously has agreed to two development deals with CNOOC International Ltd., a subsidiary of one of China's largest independent oil companies.

CNOOC paid nearly $1.8 billion for a stake in Chesapeake's operations in the Eagle Ford Shale in south Texas and the Niobrara Shale in northeast Colorado and southeast Wyoming. The Eagle Ford deal was announced in January 2011, while the Niobrara deal was announced in October 2010.

Chesapeake has been working since last year to sell assets to offset a looming budget shortfall.

The company sold more than $11 billion worth of assets to avert a cash crunch last year.

Several days before Monday's deal was announced, Chesapeake Chief Financial Officer Nick Dell'Osso said the company plans to sell $5 billion to $7 billion in assets this year.

Chesapeake also intends to sell acreage in south Texas' Eagle Ford Shale and areas outside its core holdings.

Feb. 26--Chesapeake Energy Corp. on Monday took another step toward closing a multibillion dollar funding gap.

Chesapeake announced a $1.02 billion joint venture with Sinopec International Petroleum Exploration and Production Corp. for a stake in its acreage in northern Oklahoma's Mississippi Lime play.

Chesapeake will get the bulk of the money in cash when the deal closes.

Oppenheimer analyst Fadel Gheit said the deal is not structured like a typical joint venture, which usually includes less up-front cash and more money for future drilling costs, because of Chesapeake's budget woes.

"They need the cash today and not tomorrow," Gheit said. "To them, obviously time is critical."

Sinopec will buy an interest in half of Chesapeake's 850,000 net acres in the oil-rich Mississippi Lime, then share future exploration and development costs in the play.

"We are excited to announce the execution of our Mississippi Lime joint venture with Sinopec, which moves us further along in achieving our asset sales goals and secures an excellent partner to share the capital costs required to actively develop this very large, liquids-rich resource play," said Steven C. Dixon, Chesapeake's chief operating officer.

Chesapeake's Mississippi Lime acreage produced an average of 34,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day during the fourth quarter. The acreage has proved reserves of 140 million barrels of oil equivalent.

Chesapeake's stock slipped nearly 7 percent Monday, dipping $1.39 to $19.11, a performance Gheit said may have been indicative of expectations the company would get more money for its Mississippi Lime acreage.

Sinopec is no stranger to the area, having struck a $2.5 billion deal with Devon Energy Corp. in January 2012 that included acreage in the Mississippi Lime and four other resource plays.

Gheit said such deals allow Chinese oil companies to learn techniques needed to develop that country's abundant resources.

"I call it legalized industrial espionage," he said.

Chesapeake previously has agreed to two development deals with CNOOC International Ltd., a subsidiary of one of China's largest independent oil companies.

CNOOC paid nearly $1.8 billion for a stake in Chesapeake's operations in the Eagle Ford Shale in south Texas and the Niobrara Shale in northeast Colorado and southeast Wyoming. The Eagle Ford deal was announced in January 2011, while the Niobrara deal was announced in October 2010.

Chesapeake has been working since last year to sell assets to offset a looming budget shortfall.

The company sold more than $11 billion worth of assets to avert a cash crunch last year.

Several days before Monday's deal was announced, Chesapeake Chief Financial Officer Nick Dell'Osso said the company plans to sell $5 billion to $7 billion in assets this year.

Chesapeake also intends to sell acreage in south Texas' Eagle Ford Shale and areas outside its core holdings.