Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). We’ll take our first question from Jonathan Lefebvre, Wells Fargo.
Jonathan Lefebvre - Wells Fargo
Just a couple of quick questions on the Marcellus. It looks like you increased some of your acreage. I believe you had 22,000 and at your slide you said 25. Should we expect that the strategy will be kind of grassroots leasing? Also maybe can you comment on where you're seeing lease prices? We've been hearing that the prices have not dropped with commodity prices.
Ralph Hill
You'll see a combination. We clearly are doing grassroots leasing, but we're also looking at a number of other opportunities, such as the joint venture we're in right now. So it's kind of a combination going forward. In our lease prices, we have not seen necessary decrease in the price of Marcellus leasing. But I don't really want to get into what the cost of the leases are going for right now.
Jonathan Lefebvre - Wells Fargo
It looks like you increased the hedges in Appalachia. Is that 100% hedged at this point? What you expect your production to be and then also on terms of the most reason two wells that Rex has drilled, any indication on those two wells?
Ralph Hill
We initially hedged what we thought our production would be, so we've tried to pretty full hedging on the initial amount of volume, but as we add volumes, obviously, there will be a portion that will be unhedged. We'll let Rex comment on the wells, but what I would say is the first handful of wells we looked at, we thought of them as science wells. And one of the wells that we've just completed, is much better than any science well we thought would be.
So, we're doing a lot of work on the wells. We're doing a lot of testing; trying different techniques; trying different methods of where we're going to land the horizontal laterals and those things. And the third well that we've done is actually much better than what I would call a science well. But Rex is going to comment on those wells, since they clearly are still the operator until January 1, I'll let them make the comments.
Operator
Our next question comes from Jessica Chipman with Tudor, Pickering, Holt.
Jessica Chipman - Tudor, Pickering, Holt
Looking at slide seven on your quarterly data book and production volumes by region, you can see in the third quarter that most volumes are down. I just wanted to see if you could give us some sort of clarity on where you're expecting volume growth, so that next year looks flat to slightly up.
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