This year’s winners of the 11th annual Oil and Gas Investor Excellence Awards are being honored for their achievements in 2013. They represent the full spectrum of the upstream industry’s activities, ranging from a large and well-established public company moving into a new core area, to a relatively new private-equity-backed E&P company leading a shale play, to an E&P that closed on the biggest energy IPO of the year in 2013. The winners operate in the Eagle Ford Shale, the Piceance and Permian basins, the Bakken, the Marcellus and beyond.

First, we’re pleased to honor Scott Sheffield as Executive of the Year. The chairman and CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources Co. is lucky, to be sure, to be holding the reins of a company with deep and historic West Texas roots—now deepening further through a mile of stacked pay zones in the Permian Basin that respond to horizontal drilling and fracking. The horizontal renaissance in the basin is led by and is propelling Pioneer to new heights. In addition, Pioneer is a leader in the Eagle Ford. In both plays it is reducing costs and ramping up production. Sheffield has been a leader also in the domestic industry's efforts to overturn the ban on crude oil exports.

Antero Resources Corp. receives our Financing of the Year award for its $1.57 billion IPO last October, which thus valued the company at more than $11 billion. It was the largest energy IPO of the year and rewarded the successful and rapid growth of this Denver E&P, focused on the Marcellus and Utica Shales. Antero was formed in 2002 and backed by Trilantic Capital Partners, Warburg Pincus and Yorktown Partners LLC. Since then, it has grown to be one of the most active drillers in the Northeast with 15 rigs in operation. Antero holds more than 352,000 net acres in the Marcellus and more than 107,000 net acres in the core of the Utica. In first-quarter 2014, its growth continued un- abated as net equivalent gas production rose 105% from the same quarter a year ago; its liquids output rose a stunning 583%.

Our M&A Deal of the Year goes to Devon Energy Corp. for its $6 billion, accretive acquisition of privately held GeoSouthern Energy’s Eagle Ford Shale assets—some 82,000 net acres. This deal was significant because it gained Devon, a seasoned shale pioneer, entrée to the prolific Eagle Ford play, furthering the company’s drive to become more liquids-focused (this deal was 56% oil and 20% natural gas liquids). It was expected to boost Devon’s 2014 production by 40%. In addition, the deal came with some 1,200 undrilled locations. This transaction was a significant monetization for the entire GeoSouthern team, rewarding successful operations in this play, where it had been a top-four producer, and also for its private-equity backer, The Blackstone Group.

Selecting the winner of the Best Discovery is always an exciting task, and one that we hope signals drilling opportunities for the entire industry. This year’s award goes to WPX En- ergy Inc. for its work in Colorado’s dry-gas Piceance Basin, where it is pursuing the deep, high-pressured Niobrara/Mancos Shale. It turns out that the largest Niobrara well to date is not in the Denver-Julesburg Basin on the other side of Colorado after all—it is in the Piceance. WPX’s discovery has produced more than 2.5 billion cubic feet of gas since being announced in January 2013, and it had a reported initial flow rate of 16 million a day. The company drilled four horizontal wells last year in the field and this year plans up to 10 delineation wells there. Although WPX has not released specific EURs for the find, it has said they will compare favorably to dry gas Marcellus and Haynesville wells.

Best Field Rejuvenation is one of our favorites, because it is good to know that some E&P companies are finding ways to bring old fields back to life that are not necessarily in the unconventional resource plays grabbing all the attention. Treadstone Energy Partnersany LLC of Houston is one such company. It is reviving Fort Trinidad Field’s Upper Glen Rose Unit in Madison and Houston counties in East Texas. Since acquiring the acreage in late 2012 and applying modern frack techniques, Treadstone has delivered more than half of the top 20 producing wells in the area while having completed less than 20% of the total wells drilled. Starting with recompletions and then new wells drilled in 2013, Treadstone increased production to about 7,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day currently, from about 150 equivalent barrels per day when the field was purchased.

Our Turnaround of the Year is awarded to Gastar Exploration Inc. The Houston company started 2013 with its stock trading at a mere $1.23. By year-end it had recovered to around $6 and now, analysts are predicting it will rise to $8 or $9. Last year Gastar bought back some stock, made several savvy acquisitions and settled litigation with Chesapeake Energy Corp., which had owned some 9.9% of the stock that Gastar bought back. Gastar acquired 157,000 net acres in Oklahoma’s Cana Woodford and Hunton Lime plays, immediately sold some of it for $60 million, for a net gain of $4 million in the bank, and acquired $30 million of proved developed producing reserves and additional acreage. It netted $28 million from a $74 million deal, essentially getting a 38% return in just three months.

Continental Resources Inc. receives our annual award for Best Corporate Citizen, thanks to its funding of education for future leaders. Its program is called Continental Cares: Funding the Future Grant. It awards grants of up to $5,000 to K-12 schools in its operating areas, to enhance those schools’ reading, science, technology, engineering or math programs— or, to plant the seeds for new programs to be started. The schools’ teachers apply for these grants. As the school year began in 2013, some 23 schools in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Oklahoma were grant winners. They used the grant monies to acquire micro- scopes for science labs, laptops with learning software, robotics equipment and literature for libraries. The students will benefit, and who knows who among them will become a doctor, teacher, future engineer or geologist, or find other ways to better our world?

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