Vickery Energy Partners, which is a portfolio company of Quantum Capital Group, announced last week that it had closed its acquisition of Tribune Resources. According to the January 8 announcement, the transaction includes assets located primarily in West Virginia’s Wetzel, Tyler, Harrison and Doddridge counties. The assets span roughly 38,000 net acres (154 square km) and have net production of more than 200mn cubic feet (5.7mn cubic metres) per day of gas equivalent.

Hart Energy cited a source familiar with the matter as saying that the purchase price Vickery paid for Tribune was around $400mn. The outlet added that analysts had estimated the transaction value had fallen to $350-500mn.

Vickery’s president and CEO, Sean Willis, described the acquired assets as “high quality”, with development inventory in both the wet and dry windows of the Marcellus shale.

“This transaction provides Vickery with a significant production base and multiple years of development runway, allowing us to apply our expertise and demonstrated execution capabilities to grow production, build a business of scale, and create value for our investors,” Willis added.

Willis is a former executive of Tug Hill. Quantum sold Tug Hill Operating and XcL Midstream’s portfolio of upstream and midstream assets in the Appalachian Basin to EQT for around $5.0bn in 2023.

The transaction comes amid rising demand for natural gas, including in Appalachia. A month earlier, Antero Resources announced that it was buying the upstream assets of HG Energy II in the Marcellus shale for $2.8bn while simultaneously agreeing to sell its Utica shale assets in Ohio for around $800mn.

Energy data and services provider TGS commented at the time that this capped off a busy year for mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the Marcellus, citing operators building inventory to meet rising demand from AI data centres. The company noted that according to its TGS Well Data Analytics service, the Marcellus was in a “prime position” to meet growing gas demand. Permits in the play had risen by 26% over the past year, TGS said, which it added was coupled with an increase of 3% in productivity per foot of lateral length.