Oil and gas industry veterans Joe Jaggers and Robert Anderson are back in the game with new private-equity-backed start-up entities looking for asset acquisitions. The two, coming off of separate multibillion-dollar divestments in the past couple of years, laid out their plans recently to a gathering of IPAA/TIPRO members in Houston.

Jaggers-led Jagged Peak Energy LLC will focus on assets in the Rockies, Permian Basin and the Midcontinent—assets with a strong liquids and oil focus and that can be scalable. The company will be modeled after Jaggers’ previous command, Ute Energy, owned by the Ute Indian Tribe and sold for $1 billion in 2012.

“We’re trying to do what we did at Ute Energy with Jagged Peak, albeit without the Indians this time,” Jaggers said. “We were effective in moving quickly through a monetization in a couple of years.”

At Ute, Jaggers and his team took over a portfolio of mostly nonoperated assets and accelerated production by four times and reserves by six times in a two-year window.

“One of the things we learned through the sales process was, to attract a suite of quality acquirers, it’s important to have a material base of production and reserves,” Jaggers said. “The days of flipping a large acreage position with a handful of wells to a large public company are behind us. The more interesting opportunity for those companies is likely to be assets that have an amount of production and reserves. That’s what we’re looking to do at Jagged Peak.”

Jagged Peak will take a hard look in the Uinta Basin, where Ute Energy excelled. “It’s an oil-rich basin with a lot of horizontal targets. We’re believers in being in the right neighborhoods. That’s where good things happen.”

Jaggers, for the record, is bearish on acquiring gas in the near term. “I don’t want to knock gas,” he said, “but it looks to us like the gas-supply curve is so flat that it would be difficult to see significant price improvement with the amount of resource this industry has been able to put into this country’s economy.”

Jagged Peak formed in May with a $400-million equity commitment from Quantum Energy Partners, which also backed Ute Energy.

Anderson is executive vice president and chief operating officer of Oak Valley Resources LLC. Oak Valley is led by Frank Lodzinski, former chief executive of GeoResources, which was acquired by Halcón Resources Corp. in 2012 for $1 billion. Anderson was with Lodzinski when their privately held Southern Bay Energy LLC merged into GeoResources, and stayed with Halcón for a while post-merger.

GeoResources operated from the Canadian border to the Gulf Coast, “and our focus is going to be in those same places,” Anderson projected.

“We had a good run in the Williston Basin, and getting back into the Bakken shale is something we’d like to do with the right opportunity. We also had good success in the Eagle Ford shale and Austin chalk. We think we can operate most anywhere in the Lower 48.”

Oak Valley formed in February with $150 million from EnCap Investments, The Vlasic Group and Wells Fargo. An additional $63 million was raised from private investors, largely via personal accounts of hedge fund managers that had invested in GeoResources previously.

“Having repeat investors is one of the most rewarding things you can do as a management team,” Anderson said.

Oak Valley launched with producing properties contributed by management at inception, mostly nonoperated interests in Hawkville Field in the Eagle Ford play with BHP Billiton Petroleum.

“We don’t like to start with a blank sheet,” Anderson said of the strategy. “One of the first things we look for as a new entity is cash flow. We don’t want to start digging into our own pockets on Day One.”

The company is actively pursuing producing-property acquisitions, primarily in East Texas, and primarily gas. “This might be an opportunity to buy and sit on them awhile while gas creeps back to $5,” he said, but emphasized such assets are merely a platform. “It’s not something we’re going to spend a lot of capital on. Most of our capital will be looking toward new opportunities.”

After Oak Valley establishes a base of production and cash flow, it will target acreage deals to “get a drill bit going on a multi-year development program. That’s what folks are looking for,” he said, “something in which they can see reserve growth, strong production and cash flow.”

One thing the Oak Valley team will do differently than it did at GeoResources: “We’ll add technical staff a lot sooner in the cycle,” he said. “At GeoResources, we burned a lot of midnight oil looking at deals. This time around, we want to be able to look at as many opportunities as possible.”

Oak Valley’s goal is to IPO. “We look to go public at some point,” Anderson said.

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