I read this morning BHP Billiton plans to sell all of its US oil and gas holdings including Haynesville acreage.  Estimated total value is $10 billion according to the article.  No specific value is given for the Haynesville acreage.

Now management is buckling to investor demands and says it will start shopping around its shale assets, which includes acreage in the Haynesville and Fayetteville gas plays and in the Eagle Ford and Permian tight oil fields. Andrew Mackenzie, the company's boss, played up the business, saying it has been free cash flow positive and profitable this year thanks to lower investment levels and a more efficient approach to development, no small feat at today's oil and gas prices.

But it's hard to argue that BHP's shale endeavor has been anything but a bust. The company made a big splash in US shale in 2011 when it plowed $20bn into buying up shale fields. The investment made BHP, a relative novice in the oil and gas business, a top-10 producer in the US. But the timing proved disastrous. Oil prices were more than $100 a barrel, natural gas was at around $4 per million British thermal units, and valuations had been inflated by a frenzy of deal-making. Since then, the company has written down the value of its shale business by around $13bn.

It wasn't just the financials that haven't worked out. Mackenzie revealed that a broader aim of the initial US shale investment was to use BHP's international scale and financial firepower to take shale global. That strategy has not worked out as other shale opportunities across Europe, China and Latin America have fallen well short of the early hype. "Following a global endowment study about two years ago, it became apparent to us that the opportunities to replicate US shale oil elsewhere did not exist," Mackenzie told analysts this week.

It is also more evidence that the shale business model is an uneasy fit for large mature resource companies. Investors in oil and mining majors value returns and stable dividend payouts over chasing growth. In shale, by contrast, volume growth rates rule over profits, more akin to a Silicon Valley startup than a global mining behemoth. Shale also requires a different mindset towards spending than other large oil or mining projects. The steep drop off in output from each well after just a few months of production also require constant drilling and investment. BHP would rather invest in projects against the price cycle, making its big capital commitments when prices, and costs, are down, and enjoying the payoff when prices rise. "One of the features of shale, which we have grown to like a bit less with time, and see as a bit more of a curse, is that the investments that are demanded there are quite pro-cyclical. You have to continue to invest to actually maintain the value of those businesses," Mackenzie said.

http://www.petroleum-economist.com/articles/upstream/exploration-pr...