After more than a year-long hiatus, Devon Energy Corp. is back in the buzz.

The Oklahoma City-based E&P, in its third-quarter conference call, revealed it is marketing for a joint-venture partner in its five early-stage, oil- and liquids-focused exploratory plays: the Tuscaloosa Marine shale, the Mississippi lime, the Niobrara, the Ohio Utica shale and the Michigan Basin. In total, the company holds some 1.2 million acres in the projects.

But this isn’t your standard play-by-play, pick-your-flavor joint venture. Devon is seeking a long-term, go-forward partner that will share the risks and costs to evaluate all the plays combined.

Devon chief executive and president John Richels said the strategy is no different than sharing the risk in an offshore play where wells cost a couple of hundred million to drill.

“Bringing in a partner to try to diversify some of that risk and at the same time improve our capital efficiency in the future makes a lot of sense to us.

“We see a lot of opportunities in these five plays and a lot of capital commitment over time.” The difference is the joint-venture partnership will be spread across various plays and not focused on just one.

Once a prolific acquirer, Devon made a strategic shift in 2009 to sell off its international and offshore holdings. The company raised $10 billion overall, including slipping out of the Gulf of Mexico days before the Macondo incident put deepwater M&A on hold, and put the money in the bank.

But instead of going shopping for new assets, the company instead quietly went about identifying and amassing early positions in liquids-prone emerging resource plays.

In 2011 it will spent $700 million on leases. Now, it is ready to go to market for a share of its least-developed positions.

Devon is presently pursuing a 40-well program across these five plays, in which the initial wells have been tested with additional wells in various stages of completion. While tight-lipped on results, Richels said, “We’ve been very encouraged.”

He emphasized that the company is not pursuing a joint venture because it needs the money, but to improve the risk/reward profile. “Given the strength of our balance sheet, we could easily pursue all of these opportunities simultaneously, with 100% ownership.”

He sees three specific advantages: Improving capital efficiency by recovering acreage costs and reducing future capital requirements; accelerating derisking and commercialization of the new positions; and providing the opportunity to seek exposure in more new plays with less risk.

“This is a different kind of joint venture,” he said.

He doesn’t see the new relationship lasting just a few years, but rather a couple of decades. “We want a partner that we also believe will be aligned with us on our investment objectives and that we can work with over time.”

The company is self-marketing and data rooms are already open and active with suitors. “The indications of interest we have seen from potential partners have been very strong,” he said.

The exact structure of the partnership is open for discussion, Richels indicated, and that flexibility is all important.

“Most of the joint ventures that you’ve seen in the business so far have been play specific. This one covers a lot of different plays and has some unique characteristics.”

It aligns both parties with pursuing the plays that make the most sense, he noted. “We may find that some, as we develop them, we will want to sell and put that money into other opportunities within that joint venture. It gives us flexibility to develop these opportunities on a fairly accelerated basis and to be able to allocate funds to any area that seems most promising at the moment.”