Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from David Heikkinen – Tudor Pickering & Co. Securities.
David Heikkinen – Tudor Pickering & Co. Securities
I had a question on kind of the Marcellus, thinking about first the wells that you’re drilling in each area vertically and then the potential plans around what you mentioned in West Virginia either sell down or joint venture. I kind of just wanted to get an update on when you’re drilling verticals and when you drill the horizontals and then the sell down?
S. P. Johnson, IV
The first question, when we’ll start drilling verticals in West Virginia, hopefully that will be this summer. We have locations picked based on well control and 2D seismic and we should be able to get that started in the fall. Horizontal drilling everywhere is basically still dependent upon vertical well results. If there’s enough good control around us, say in Susquehanna county, we might be able to skip a step and go straight to horizontal drilling but we’d like to get 3D seismic before we do that. As far as the – it was not a sell down, we were trying to acquire some more acreage in West Virginia through a farm out or some kind of potential JV with the land owner.
Operator
Your next question comes from Leo Mariani – RBC Capital Markets.
Leo Mariani – RBC Capital Markets
A couple of questions here, on the Barnett obviously you’ve got a lot of wells in backlog waiting on completion. Can you give us a sense in terms of when you think those are going to turn to sales? What are you guys looking for? Is it service cost coming down, gas prices going up, kind of a combination of the two? Should we kind of be thinking about brining those on in the winter, is that the plan?
S. P. Johnson, IV
The plan is based on both. We are seeing the service cost come down, our frac costs are now 50% lower than they were in January but, the commodity prices even though they’ve rallied in the last week, we’re not convinced that it’s time to start spending the money yet. The other price deck we have to pay attention to is of course the bank price deck, as much as we look at any futures prices. So, we think it’s probably prudent to wait and frac about four wells in June and then right now we’re planning on fracing about 10 more wells sometimes towards the end of the third quarter.
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