Enduring Resources Seeking Buyers for $1.4 Billion Texas Shale-Gas Field

Enduring Resources LLC, the Denver- based gas explorer backed by private equity firms including Trilantic Capital Partners, plans to seek buyers for assets in Texas that may be worth more than $1.4 billion.

Enduring hired Bank of America Corp. and Simmons & Co. to market the holdings, which include 123,000 acres in the Eagle Ford shale field in South Texas, Chief Executive Officer Barth Whitham said in an interview yesterday.

The planned auction is the latest effort to capitalize on a rush among some of the world’s biggest energy companies for oil and gas trapped in shale. Buyers including international companies such as Statoil ASA, Total SA, and Reliance Industries Ltd. have struck deals to invest $18 billion in U.S. shale this year, buying companies and forming ventures with local partners.

Last month, Pioneer Natural Resources Co., based in Irving, Texas, agreed to sell a stake in an Eagle Ford venture that is adjacent to Enduring’s for $1.3 billion to Mumbai-based Reliance. The transaction values the Pioneer assets at $11,100 an acre, according to Neil Beveridge, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in Hong Kong.

Enduring is putting its entire South Texas holding on the market, including Eagle Ford and other fields, Whitham said. The company is open to selling less than 100 percent of the assets and expects the buyer would want to operate the fields, he said. Enduring also operates in East Texas and Utah.

In 2010’s biggest shale deal, Royal Dutch Shell Plc agreed to buy East Resources Inc., which operates in the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania and surrounding states, for $4.7 billion.

Fourfold Return

The sale promises a more than fourfold return for KKR & Co., the buyout firm run by Henry Kravis and George Roberts, on a $350 million investment in East Resources last year, said two people with knowledge of that transaction. East Resources is based in Warrendale, Pennsylvania.

Shale-gas deposits weren’t considered worth tapping before Houston billionaire George P. Mitchell pioneered new extraction techniques in the 1990s.

Enduring was founded in 2004 by Whitham, the CEO, and other former executives of Westport Resources Corp. Its initial equity capitalization was $200 million, Oil & Gas Investor magazine reported in November 2006.

Enduring got some of its start-up capital from Encap Investments LP, which focuses on energy investments and is based in Houston and Dallas, and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s buyout fund, which later spun off and took the Trilantic name. Trilantic put another $130 million into the company last year, the website Private Equity Online reported.

To contact the reporters on this story: Zachary R. Mider in New York at zmider1@bloomberg.net; Cristina Alesci in New York at calesci2@bloomberg.net

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