Chesapeake holds annual meeting
Chesapeake holds annual meeting

Aubrey McClendon, chairman and chief executive of Chesapeake Energy Corp., was re-elected to the company's board of directors along with former Sen. Don Nickles during the company's annual meeting Friday in Oklahoma City.

Shareholders also turned away a shareholder-submitted agenda item to require board members to stand for annual elections, and listened to McClendon talk about energy policy and politics and the company's performance during 2007.

McClendon called the year one of "outstanding achievement” for the company, noting that it ended the year with its largest-ever backlog of drilling opportunities — enough to last the company a decade.

"And that means we have about 100 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves that we believe are out there to be captured by our future drilling, compared to the about 11 trillion cubic feet of (proved) gas reserves that we have ... today,” he said.

"Our accomplishments this year resulted from the consistent execution of our focused business strategy, the safe location of our assets onshore in the U.S., and the predictable base of production that we generate everyday from our 39,000 properties,” he said.

McClendon said he expects the company to surpass Anadarko Petroleum and BP to become the nation's largest producer of natural gas in the U.S. later this year.

McClendon noted Friday that Chesapeake remains the most active driller in the country with about 150 operated rigs and 90 other non-operated rigs drilling on Chesapeake leases.

The company is operates within the Anadarko Basin and the Woodford Shale in Oklahoma, the Fayetteville Shale in Arkansas, the Barnett Shale, the Permian and Delaware basins, the South Texas and Texas Gulf Coast fields in Texas, the Haynesville Shale and Ark-La-Tex fields in Louisiana and Texas and Arkansas, the Alabama Shale in Alabama and the Marcellus and Appalachia shales in Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York.

The company has nearly 14 million acres leased.

McClendon particularly noted the Haynesville Shale field.

"We think this will be the most significant play in the company's history,” he said. "We are really off to the races in that play and are accelerating our growth there.”

McClendon said his company will continue to lobby Congress to convince it that Chesapeake is one of the "good guys” in the debate about today's energy world.

"We are trying to produce more clean-burning, American-produced natural gas to meet America's demand for a fuel that will allow us to import less oil from unfriendly countries around the world, hopefully burn a little less coal, and at the same time, create jobs and wealth right here in the U.S.,” he said.

"I think the days of having a president go to the Middle East and ask them to produce more oil when we aren't willing to put wells in parts of our Gulf Coast and off our other shores rings pretty hollow.”

Chesapeake, like all of the nation's domestic energy companies, does not believe heaping more taxes on energy companies is an answer to today's high prices for gasoline, oil and natural gas, McClendon said.

"I would like to believe we are past the point in this country of thinking that the way we can meet a supply shortage is to take more money from those companies that are producing the supply ... that's a textbook example of how you produce still higher prices,” he said.

"I hope at the end of the day, calmer voices and minds prevail.”

McClendon said he thinks motorists will be able to eventually drive compressed natural gas vehicles that they will be able to fill using natural gas already delivered to their homes.

"Of all the ideas about how we are going to wean ourselves away from imported oil, none of them have as much scalability, affordability and the ability to be a here-and-now solution as natural gas.”

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