OKLAHOMA CITY—Looking back on how well a project fared under extreme conditions is rarely undertaken without a degree of apprehension. And yet, attendees at Hart Energy’s recent DUG Midcontinent Conference heard Ben Lamb, executive vice president of corporate development at EnLink Midstream, discuss how EnLink acquired assets to create its central Oklahoma supersystem.

To set the stage: The timing was December 2015, when the capital markets to finance an acquisition were “truly broken,” recalled Lamb. EnLink’s target was Tall Oak Midstream LLC. Simultaneously, the majority owner of EnLink, Devon Energy Corp. (NYSE: DVN), was acquiring 80,000 net acres in the Stack play from private-equity-backed Felix Energy LLC. The two transactions were valued at more than $1.5 billion apiece.

Lamb’s scorecard for grading a successful acquisition made under extreme conditions contains several key questions: is there conviction in the resource? Does EnLink Midstream have an established presence in the area where it is making the acquisition? Does the area have committed quality customers? And particularly, given the commodity environment at the time, is there a “brand new transaction structure?”

According to Lamb, an analysis by his firm “starts with the rock. Because if the rock isn’t good, nothing else matters.” And while information was limited at the time, Lamb had access to results from about 30 wells that produced from the Meramec Formation on which to base an investment decision. In addition, a small number of operators were known to be “achieving very impressive performance,” he said.

Today, those early results are being borne out by increasing production rates and “very encouraging” spacing tests, Lamb said. In addition, EnLink Midstream infrastructure covers not just the core Meramec, but an area spanning the normally pressured oil window in the northeast to dry gas production in the southwest.

“Most exciting,” Lamb added, was the ongoing expansion to the northwest of the new Osage play, the so-called Mergeplays to the south, and operators such as Gastar Exploration Inc. (NYSE MKT: GST) expanding to the northeast during the time of the acquisition.

In terms of having an established presence in the area during the time of the acquisition, Lamb pointed to prior EnLink processing assets, including its Cana-Woodford system. Today, with the addition of the Battle Ridge and Chisolm plants, EnLink now has three interconnected processing complexes with 595 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of capacity, he said. This will grow to 795 MMcf/d with the commissioning of the Chisolm II plant in the first half of 2017.

With parent Devon Energy replacing Felix Energy as the largest customer on the acquired system, the interests of EnLink and its major customer were obviously aligned.

“We knew we were getting a great customer in Devon,” Lamb said, “and that came with a 15-year contract supported by some volume commitments.”

But the transaction brought with it not only Devon, but also 15 customers,“and I can’t stress enough how much we value the portfolio impact of having multiple customers, because it gives us more ways to win. If any single customer slows down, it’s more than likely the slack is being picked up by another customer.”

Since EnLink acquired the Tall Oak assets, several well-known producers have taken positions in the Scoop and Stack plays, Lamb pointed out. These include Marathon Oil Corp.’s (NYSE: MRO) purchase of PayRock Energy LLC, Newfield Exploration Co.’s (NYSE: NFX) acquisition of an acreage package from Chesapeake Energy Corp. (NYSE: CHK), and Jones Energy Inc.’s (NYSE: JONE) move into the Merge play. In addition to Devon, these are all now EnLink customers.

“A deal this big in a market as bad as we found ourselves in last year required a lot of creativity to get done,” Lamb said. “The initial reaction from our investors was, ‘what are you guys thinking? Why are you making a $1.55 billion deal in the worst market that any of us can remember?’”

At the time of the deal, “we really were living with truly broken capital markets, where public capital was not available to [MLPs],” Lamb said. “Doing a deal of this size required pulling every lever, and to use every trick in the book.”

Terms of the deal included a privately placed convertible preferred equity issue for $750 million with TPG and Goldman Sachs. Also, the deal gave thesellers $250 million of general partner equity—a move that “was something that we just don’t do lightly,” Lamb said. Finally, there was a cash payment that was deferred for one year in order to manage the timing of the cash outlay with the timing of the cash flow from the asset.

The challenge was “to do a deal of this size without materially changing our leverage ratio,” given an objective of also retaining an investment grade rating, Lamb said.

Chris Sheehan can be reached at csheehan@hartenergy.com.