Quote Originally Posted by warreng88 View Post
General question because I am too stupid to understand: Aubrey openly stated he wanted to build out the campus to employ 10,000 people. Back in 2014, GAR was $23 billion. Now, with the merger, they will employ 800 people. Was Aubrey over employing or has technology changed enough in ten years to where you don't need as many employees as much?

Again, not trolling, not knocking Aubrey, genuinely asking...
1) Technology has made it possible to operate large assets with much fewer people. Especially on the operations side. Things have changed a ton since 2004-2013 (when CHK experienced most of its growth). CHK was on the cutting edge of a lot of new tech so they actively helped spur the development of some of the tech that’s made life easier in the industry.
2) They were over employing to an extent but also…
3) They are no longer trying to lease up every square inch of the mineral rights in every play in the US. That has stopped for a multitude of reasons but primarily because there is a finite amount of drillable acreage, most of which is leased currently (tier 1 acreage at least), and commodities prices combined with some prospects not panning out has shrunk that the amount of desirable acreage (ending the massive land grabs of the 2005-2016 time frame) and to state the obvious, commodity pricing and the resulting financial disaster for CHK put an end to their leasing boom. Huge leasing plays take a huge support staff in addition to the personnel who primarily work on developing the assets so with the company’s shift to primarily focusing on development of its asset base over the last decade, they’ve needed fewer and fewer people. As an example, they had and maintained a massive title plant that housed the complete records for hundreds of courthouses across the country and hundreds of lawyers and Landman researching title there, that mostly went away after **** hit the fan and they slowed down their leasing efforts.
4) Aubrey vertically integrated CHK which was part of the reason for the 10,000 employee campus and after around 2010-2011, CHK started spinning off anything that wasn’t part of the upstream E&P company. Access Midstream, several of the drilling and completion service companies and other components were spun off, further reducing headcount.