Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. The question-and-answer session will be conducted electronically. (Operator instructions). Our first question will come from Brian Singer from Goldman Sachs.
Brian Singer - Goldman Sachs
Thank you very much. Good morning.
Harold Korell
Good morning.
Steve Mueller
Good morning.
Brian Singer - Goldman Sachs
When you think longer term over let's say 2009, 2010, how do you see the balance sheet playing out? You have obviously just highlighted a number of the assets sales that you have made to shore up the balance sheet. When you think about your spending levels and free cash, do you see further asset sales down the road or do you think that Fayetteville gets into a position where you can continue to grow, maybe take up the net tangible capital a little bit, but be comfortable with that?
Harold Korell
Brian, a lot of variables go into answering that question. One would be, what is the gas price during that time period, one that is becoming less of a variable to us. We know our production volumes are growing substantially, as you can see from the information that we’ve been presenting over the last few quarters in the Fayetteville Shale and of course, the other variable is what would be our investing. We do not use the term spending, but the word we use for it is investing. What will our program be? What investment levels will we be looking at in our capital program for those years? So there are a lot of moving variables.
I can tell you, though, that just looking at this year, the direction of our production and where prices have been are driving our debt levels down in addition to the dispositions of properties that we’ve just done. The dispositions that we’ve done, properties we’ve sold in 2008, I would say all except the Fayetteville Shale represented strategic decisions. In other words, our strategy is not to be a utility company and over the years we’ve looked to an exit there, which came to us, and so we took advantage of that.
The Gulf Coast and the Permian areas are areas that we’ve played and had activities in for a number of years and just had a difficult time building to what we would consider a position that was worth us pursuing it, and so we decided to exit those, some part due to the capital we would benefit from there, but I would say more so just not to have the distraction of those activities going on and being able to redeploy the people who are working on those, on projects that we think have a higher return.
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