Tag - Kgs

Liberty Media Corp. (Nasdaq:LCAPB), Eastern Insurance Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq:EIHI) and First Bancorp Inc. (Nasdaq:FNLC) are among the biggest percentage losers in Thursday's trading among companies with market capitalizations under $1 billion.

Also included among the results: STEC Inc. (Nasdaq:STEC), SmartHeat Inc. (Nasdaq:HEAT), Life Partners Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq:LPHI), Conn's Inc. (Nasdaq:CONN), Quicksilver Gas Services LP (Nasdaq:KGS) and Unica Corp. (Nasdaq:UNCA).

These days, if you’re buying a house in or around Forth Worth, Texas, negotiations with your realtor probably won’t just revolve around marble tiling, slate roofs and granite countertops — you might also have a conversation about shale.

That’s because the region surrounding Fort Worth overlays a massive shale formation (known as Barnett Shale) that holds an enormous amount of high-BTU natural gas that mining companies are eager to get a hold of and new gas service entrant Quicksilver Gas Services (NYSE:KGS) is eager to process.

To mine Barnett Shale, mining companies have been paying huge premiums to landowners to lease mineral rights (as high as $23,000 per acre). Expensive, but worth it — as long as gas prices remain near their present all-time highs, that is. 

Mining activity in the Barnett play has grown exponentially to over 8,000 producing wells today from just one in 1981. That explosion has been primarily driven by the gargantuan amounts of gas waiting to be withdrawn. Current estimates indicate upwards of 30 trillion cubic feet of gas in the ground, making it perhaps the second-largest onshore gas field in the United States. But no one knows for sure; it seems the more they drill, the more they find.

However, what’s really turned up the competitive heat for producers was . . .