US gas specialist Petrohawk Energy is planning a drilling push into 2012 to secure its leasehold in the Haynesville and Eagle Ford shale plays.

The company began leasing extensively in the two plays beginning in 2008, often under three-year lease terms.

Now Petrohawk needs to sink wells to keep its acreage, Petrohawk operations boss Richard Stoneburner told the IHS CeraWeek conference in Houston.

Petrohawk will run 17 rigs on its Haynesville acreage and another four to five rigs on its Eagle Ford position.

Haynesville will take about $900 million of a $1.4 billion planned capital spend, while Eagle Ford will claim about $300 million.

That focus will then flip after 2011, when the company plans to focus more of its spending on the Eagle Ford.

Stoneburner said those spending levels are not “discretionary” because the rig count is being driven largely by the company’s need to hold acreage, but by
2012, he expects that to change.

“What happens in 2012 will be dictated by the market and won’t be dictated by need to protect our leasehold investment,” he said.

Stoneburner said the company would prefer not to follow in the footsteps of other independent shale specialists that have leverage their acreage
positions for drilling dollars through joint ventures.

“We are protective of what we think of as premiere assets,” he said. “But if we need it it is an option.”

Stoneburner declined to comment if his company had been approached with joint venture offers.

Petrohawk is currently divesting the lion’s share of its conventional assets, excluding positions in the Cotton Valley and Elm Grove plays, and plans to
wrap its divestitures by the first half of the year.

Stoneburner said he is comfortable that the company’s remaining focus on gas, which makes up more then 90% of the portfolio.

Petrohawk has begun work on its Red Hawk field, which targets liquids, but Stoneburner said the company was not ready to disclose its efforts there or
any results and oil is not going to be a focus moving forward.

“We don’t ignore it,” he said after his talk. “But I’m not going to make it a priority of our company.”