Empire Petroleum Corp. (Empire) has acquired producing oil and gas assets and related gathering assets located in Lea County, New Mexico, through its wholly owned subsidiary, Empire New Mexico LLC (Empire New Mexico). The assets were acquired from ExxonMobil’s XTO Holdings LLC.
The acquired assets include nearly 700 oil, gas, and injector wells and encompass approximately 40,000 acres (16,187 ha) of Permian leasehold located in the Eunice Monument (EMSU) and Arrowhead Grayburg (AGU) fields.
“We believe the EMSU and surrounding acquired fields have a significant resource base,” said Mike Morrisett, president of Empire Petroleum. “In our view, these assets have current infill drilling and return-to-production well potential that should shortly enhance daily production. We thank our major and core shareholders in providing 100% of the capital to close this key accretive transaction for Empire. We are also excited to have retained the existing Sellers’ team that has successfully run the field for several years. With this acquisition Empire operates in five states, with an aggregate of over 100,000 net leasehold acres (40,468 ha) and about 1800 net barrels of oil equivalent per day.”
“Looking towards the future, the geologic location of the Permian EMSU and AGU holds 23,400 acres (9469 ha) of residual oil zone potential,” added Tommy Pritchard, CEO of Empire. “The pipeline of growth opportunities around EMSU and AGU remains robust, and we are currently evaluating additional deal flow with a focus on building scale in the Permian.”
