Jerry Jones Says He Has Unlocked a $100 Billion Gas Bounty in This Drilling Inferno

Cowboys owner backs Comstock’s bid to develop some of the hottest, deepest wells in the U.S.

Oct. 29, 2025 wsj.com

LEON COUNTY, Texas—Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones turned his team into the world’s most valuable sports franchise. But when he rides in his helicopter over this rural stretch of east Texas, he says he sees his best investment ever: The making of a major natural gas province.

Jones has poured more than $1 billion into natural gas driller Comstock Resources CRK 1.83%increase; green up pointing triangle

, betting it can drill some of the hottest, deepest wells in the U.S.—and unleash a torrent of new gas supplies.

Comstock says it is set to do just that. It has trumped hellish geology and cranked out dozens of gushers. It has also gone on a stealthy land grab and controls a large chunk of a region it calls the Western Haynesville. As a result, it says it is gearing up to pump enough fuel to help meet the soaring needs of exporters, data centers and heavy industries for years to come.

Now, Jones says, it’s payday. “There’s $100 billion present value with gas out there,” the 83-year-old billionaire said in an interview. “That’s why I’m talking to you on the telephone rather than trying to fix our defense with the Dallas Cowboys.” 

Jones is known for zigging when others are zagging. He made a big wager on natural gas when prices were in the gutter, and he has funded Comstock’s exploration at a time when its rivals are sticking with Wall Street’s strict capital edicts. He has kept buying shares and now owns roughly 71% of the company. 

Thanks to those risky moves, Comstock finds itself sitting on promising territory at an auspicious time. A wall of new natural gas demand is set to test aging and pipe-constrained basins from Louisiana to Appalachia and drive prices higher. The Western Haynesville is about 100 miles from Dallas, one of the U.S.’s fastest-growing regions, and about 250 miles from Gulf Coast facilities that liquify and ship natural gas. 

“It’s got an excellent location; it is part of a petroleum system that is super, super high potential,” said Robert Clarke, vice president of upstream research at energy research firm Wood Mackenzie. “It’s got some really cool ingredients.”

Analysts caution Comstock’s exploration campaign is still in its early days, and it remains to be seen whether the company can pump resources across its vast new domain without hiccups. 

The Western Haynesville, which stretches over four counties, isn’t exactly a new discovery. It shares geological traits with the Haynesville Shale of east Texas and northwest Louisiana, a major basin where Comstock has long operated. But its rock lies much deeper, at up to 19,000 feet, which is equivalent to stacking up 13 Empire State Buildings. Temperatures can reach more than 400 degrees Fahrenheit; the pressure can be as high as at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, the deepest point in the world’s oceans. 

Some companies tried their luck at poking holes here in the early 2010s but walked away after their wells couldn’t endure the extreme conditions. Producers then took a wide berth around the region—until Comstock showed up with new technology, data and Jones’s blessing.

‘Man on the moon’

Jones, a veteran wildcatter, has a long history of making bold bets. He bought the Cowboys in 1989 for $140 million—the team’s enterprise value has since swelled to $13 billion, according to a recent Forbes ranking.

In 2018, Jones turned his sights on Comstock, a driller that was originally organized in 1919 as a gold and silver mining company. Natural gas prices were in the doldrums, but Jones contributed oil and gas properties to the company in exchange for about $620 million in Comstock shares. The following year he doubled down when he helped fund Comstock’s acquisition of rival Covey Park Energy with $475 million of his own money.

This was a pivotal moment. The deal netted Comstock a foothold in the Western Haynesville and a team of engineers well-versed in the region’s oddities.

A little over a year after the deal closed, Comstock’s management went to the Cowboys’ headquarters, laid out a map in front of Jones, and suggested the company lease some land in the area and drill a well—the equivalent of dipping its toe in new waters.

Jones studied the map, asked how much it would cost to lease land, and said he wanted to make a run at most of it. “We’re going to operate in the play, and we had an opportunity to do it because acres were available,” he said in the interview. “Let’s be aggressive.”

An emergent natural gas basin

Comstock considered doing more mergers and acquisitions to grow its inventory but opted to make a big push in the Western Haynesville, executives say. While some 100 landmen amassed as much land as possible, Comstock started tinkering with techniques to drill more than 3 miles below the surface. 

“The question is, can you really drill a vertical well 17 to 19,000 foot vertical?” said Chief Executive Jay Allison. “It’s like putting a man on the moon.”

Comstock faced a number of challenges. The motors that drive the drill bit through the rock burned. Engineers had to design a well casing that could handle the subterranean inferno. It took them 95 days to drill a first well in 2022, an eternity compared with the roughly three weeks it can take to bore a hole in the Haynesville next door. 

The company has benefited from leaps in technology and since made big strides. On a recent visit, a crew was operating a purpose-built rig that can stack up to 30,000 feet of pipe, the length needed to drill some of the deeper wells. The pipe is insulated, which knocks off up to 40 degrees of temperature down the hole. Comstock has borrowed techniques from offshore drillers to maintain pressure in the well and avoid failures.

Comstock has now brought roughly 30 wells online at an average cost of about $30 million. They are about twice as expensive as in the Haynesville but yield about twice as much and are competitive with current natural gas prices near $3 per million British thermal units, executives say. They say Comstock is still learning and expects costs to come down as it drills more. 

“We pulled off something that nobody thought that we could,” said Patrick McGough, vice president of operations. 

Analysts say the campaign has been promising thus far but note that there are still a number of unknowns. Comstock has drilled mostly in one pocket of the region, and it’s unclear whether other areas will yield such prolific wells—and how the wells will behave over time. 

“It’s going to take a bit of trial and error,” said Alex Ljubojevic, an analyst at energy-analytics platform Enverus.

Industry exception

Other companies, such as privately held Aethon Energy Management and a U.S. unit of Japan’s Mitsui, have also been making a foray in the region. Expand Energy, the largest natural gas producer in the U.S., said on Tuesday that it has acquired more than 75,000 net acres in the area. But Comstock has so far been the most aggressive in cobbling together its empire.

The company, which has a market value of about $5 billion, has borrowed from banks and reinvested all of its own cash to fund exploration. Its total debt stood at $3.1 billion in the second quarter, up about 39% from early 2023, according to FactSet. The company spent more in the field than it generated from its operations in eight of the past nine quarters.

Jerry Jones obtains majority stake

The spending makes Comstock an exception among its peers. Public natural gas drillers once splurged with abandon while seeking growth at all costs, but in recent years they have heeded investors’ demand that they rein in spending in the field, reduce debt and return cash to shareholders. They are gobbling each other up to expand their inventories, which Wall Street sees as less risky than exploring for new resources.

Expand Energy, EQT and Coterra Energy are expected to collectively reinvest about 54% of the cash flow they generate from their operations back into the field between 2021 and 2028 on average, according to Wood Mackenzie. Comstock’s average reinvestment rate is projected to be more than 100%.

“A lot of companies have cash on hand, capital returns via buybacks and dividends,” said Gabriele Sorbara, an analyst at financial-services firm Siebert Williams Shank. “Comstock is, you know, the complete opposite of the industry.”

Comstock executives say it is cheaper to create its own drilling locations than to buy a rival’s. They say consolidation in the sector means that companies aren’t developing new supplies, even as the U.S. faces new natural gas demand fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence, the reshoring of industries and a slew of new LNG terminals.

“We’re focused on solutions to our lack of inventory in the coming years,” Allison, Comstock’s CEO, said of the country’s needs. “It’s not M&A, M&A and a shuffle of inventory. It’s finding new inventory.” 

Jones says he understands why investors are imposing capital discipline on companies, but he isn’t looking for Comstock to return cash. When natural gas prices fell last year to their lowest levels in decades, he approved the company’s decision to suspend its dividend—and bought about $240 million in additional stock. His investment has already proved lucrative, with his stake currently worth about $3.6 billion. 

Jones says his focus is for Comstock to develop the Western Haynesville into a premier natural gas basin, and he’s ready to inject more cash into the company if needed. 

“I think this is going to be one of the two or three top-ranked sources of gas in the United States,” he said. 

Write to Benoît Morenne at benoit.morenne@wsj.com