There will likely be no dearth of assets coming onto the market for the startup exploration and production (E&P) company with an acquire-and-exploit strategy, according to Brad Marvin, vice president of business development, for FourPoint Energy LLC.

“What we heard from (Jefferies LLC managing director) Bill Marko this morning is there is likely going to be a lot of opportunities on the market from larger companies shedding assets,” Marvin said at Hart Energy’s A&D Strategies and Opportunities conference in Dallas.

Marko noted, in his presentation, that just 12 U.S. operators have room for between 8,000 and 68,000 wells in their unconventional-resource leasehold. “They’re just never going to get to that inventory,” he said. “It doesn’t have any present value. It’s not going to show up in their stock price. So this is where big companies are thinking about ‘What am I going to do with my excess inventory?’

“…There are lots of (asset) trades to happen here.”

Operators in his tally range from ExxonMobil Corp. (NYSE: XOM) to Encana Corp. (NYSE: ECA, TO: ECA.TO), Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (NYSE: APC), Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX) and Apache Corp. (NYSE: APA) “You can see (deal flow) in action with Apache and others…They want to focus on what they’re good at and they want to get to it in the next five to 10 years and not in the next 50 years.

“So, like what (shareholder) activism did in the past couple of years to drive deal flow, I think this will drive deal flow in the future—the rationalization of these big acreage positions. We’re in the first couple of innings of rationalization.”

Greenwood Village, Colo.-based FourPoint is George Solich’s fourth startup; the first three—Cordillera Energy Partners I, II and III—operated in the Anadarko, San Juan, Permian, Williston and East Texas basins with private-equity backing from EnCap Investments LP. They were sold for a combined $4.4 billion.

With current and upcoming deal flow, FourPoint will likely be able to stick to its exploitation strategy, Marvin said. “Exploration is probably not going to be core to our strategy right now.”

Formed in January, the company has re-entered the Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma for Granite Wash and other stacked pay—ranging from Tonkawa to Marmaton and Skinner—with a $275.1million purchase from QEP Resources Inc. (NYSE: QEP) that closed this summer. The deal value was $8,629 per thousand cubic feet equivalent (Mcfe) of daily production, $1.32 per proved Mcfe and $5,853 per acre, Marvin said. The 642 wells were producing 32 MMcfe a day from 47,000 net acres.

“When we purchased QEP’s Granite Wash assets…the background was that QEP was focused on its liquids transition…so it kind of fell out of focus.”

FourPoint’s knowledge of the area—the team has worked it together beginning with Cordillera I in 2000—includes a proprietary geologic database of 24 regional cross-sections (15,000 square miles) and some 200,000 wells. When it came onto the market, FourPoint moved quickly, Marvin said.

“We were able to see how it fit into our visualization of what we wanted the asset to become in the next three to four years.”

The QEP property was put into FourPoint’s joint venture (JV) with EnerVest Ltd., the privately held operator of EV Energy Partners LP (NASDAQ: EVEP). In the arrangement, EnerVest operates the properties and FourPoint leads geological analysis and leasing. “They’re a pretty quick shop also, so that can be an advantage in a very complex basin such as this,” Marvin said.

The JV also owns Granite Wash properties that were sold in 2013 by Laredo Petroleum Inc. (NYSE: LPI) and SM Energy Co. (NYSE: SM) and include interests in more than 1,200 wells. As of early May, the JV had accumulated more than 160,000 net acres.

Marvin said shareholder activism and basin consolidations have created the opportunity for the ex-Cordillera group to re-enter the Granite Wash. QEP sold to shift to an oilier profile; Laredo sold to deploy the capital in the Permian Basin; SM and Newfield Exploration Co. (NYSE: NFX) sold to focus on fewer basins; and Forest Oil Corp. (NYSE: FST) sold to reduce its debt.

Linn Energy LLC (NASDAQ: LINE) is also selling. It had entered Granite Wash exploration when deal flow for mature assets suited to its MLP-like distributions model was suspended while E&Ps owning these were anticipating other formations in its leasehold might become unconventional-resource plays. With Linn’s recent deals for mature properties in the Hugoton Basin, it is now planning to sell its Granite Wash position in the Anadarko Basin.

Marvin said, “From our perspective, all of this (is) a stroke of opportunity and there are secondary and tertiary effects in this turnover in the market.”