The night skies shine with gas-filled stars—tiny, dying white dwarfs, blue supergiants and supernovas stretching across the sky.

The shale plays in the Lower 48 occupy a much humbler constellation, but a lucrative one. Complications arise when the brightly shining Marcellus and the collapsing Barnett shales orbit the same deal.

In September, Rice Energy Inc. agreed to buy Vantage Energy LLC’s Marcellus assets for $2.7 billion; about $600 million in assets will drop down to Rice’s midstream company, Rice Midstream Partners LP.

Vantage threw in 57 square miles of the Barnett, as well. Consensus value: next to nothing.

Since April, Rice has clearly wanted Vantage’s Greene County, Pennsylvania, Marcellus acreage. Rice was the designated stalking horse bidder on 31,323 net acres being sold by bankrupt Alpha Natural Resources Inc. Rice offered $200 million for the acreage, which is adjacent to its own acreage in Greene.

In May, however, Vantage took the acreage with a $339.5 million bid.

Roughly four months later, Rice is cutting a vastly bigger check for 85,047 net Marcellus acres. The tagalong to the deal—37,000 Barnett acres—barely registered on analysts’ radar screens.

Rice’s deal raises two questions. First: Does the Barnett make any sense for Rice (or anyone)? And, had Rice won the Greene acreage bid earlier this year, would it still buy Vantage?

Gabriele Sorbara, an analyst at The Williams Capital Group, told Oil and Gas Investor he thinks Rice would still be after Vantage.

“This is a great transaction with acreage/midstream synergies and inventory expansion potential. Overall, we think the Rice team got Vantage at a reasonable valuation.”

For investors, “reasonable valuation” may not sound too sexy.

However, depending on how you spin the numbers, Rice got a fair-to-solid deal.

Vantage bought Alpha’s Greene County acreage at $12,400 per acre.

Backing out the deal’s midstream and production value, Rice is paying about $10,600 per acre, said Jonathan D. Wolff, an equity analyst at Jefferies. Wolff assigned no value to the Barnett acreage.

Seaport Global Securities suggested Rice paid more: about $12,000 per acre. Sorbara’s math put the Marcellus acreage at about $12,971 per acre.

He noted that Rice will walk away from the deal as a leading player in Appalachia with 231,000 net acres and 1,164 drilling locations—roughly 20 years’ worth of inventory.

This likely pushes the deal into the win column for Rice.

As for the Barnett, Daniel J. Rice IV, Rice’s CEO, made it clear on a Sept. 28 conference call that the acreage isn’t exactly a high priority.

“It’s certainly not a core focus for us,” he said. “It came with the fantastic assets in the Appalachian [Basin], where 99% of our focus is going to be.”

He added that the Barnett is a long-lived producing property that is 97% held by production. “We have plenty of time to ultimately figure out what we want to do with it.”

It’s worth noting that the Barnett produces about one-third of Vantage’s gas and, as Cowen & Co. said, it could provide Rice with Gulf Coast optionality.

Could perception be a factor?

In August, debt-burdened Chesapeake Energy Corp. celebrated its divestiture of about 215,000 net Barnett acres and 65,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, despite receiving no money from the buyer. Chesapeake’s move eliminated billions of dollars in future expenses.

Lost in the commotion was French oil and gas company Total’s exercise of an option to buy Chesapeake’s 75% stake in the Barnett in early September. Total will pay $558 million to restructure its gas gathering agreements and eliminate minimum volume commitments.

Guy Baber, senior research analyst for Piper Jaffray & Co., observed somewhat wryly, “we ultimately believe there are better ways to spend $500 million and that the Barnett should not be competing for capital in the Total portfolio for the next few years.”

Some Barnett areas continue to produce strong results, but the play is not commanding respect, at least in valuations above proved developed producing value, Sorbara said.

The Barnett may be a long way from its heyday as a premier shale, but it isn’t Florida swampland, either. In December, the U.S. Geological Survey found the Barnett holds 53 trillion cubic feet of gas, twice that of previous estimates.

The Barnett is burning dimly among gassy plays. But as astronomer Phil Plait once said, “…in fact, the brightest star would live the shortest amount of time. Feel free to extract whatever life lesson you want from that.”