Yes, selling off "marginal" assets! Everybody uses that term, it is so ridiculous.
having worked in the industry through a number of downturns I can say for a fact it is hardly "ridiculous". For all companies it is true that "one mans trash is another mans treasure". The term marginal asset simply reflects how that asset stands up in a companies portfolio with respect to IRR, free net-cashflow, liabilities etc. A company looking to reduce it's debt will look at the bottom part of its portfolio and sell or farmout which accomplishes two things: 1. it generates capital to be reinvested or pay down debt and 2. it focuses their efforts on the best performing parts of a portfolio. The buyer of the asset in most cases sees a means by which they can generate more value. As an example some land that is the bottom of the portfolio of a company such as CHK might very well fit into the upper part of a portfolio of a small company that is looking for an entry into a particular play. This is why I have said a few times before that low prices are often helpful to the industry as it eliminates poor performers and puts assets in the hands of those who can get the most out of them. There are many stories out there of successful companies who started out buying lands or production from a large company who didn't see the value or the value proposition didn't stand up against their other investments.
Their deficit b/w Capex and cash flow was about 2 billion USD last year. That's a lot of blood. If they didn't owe so much money, the banks would have cut them off by now.
You probably shouldn't be investing in oil and gas shares at all if this is how you read their financials. This from their press release on 4th quarter results:
Chesapeake reported a net loss available to common stockholders of $4.881 billion, or $6.39 per share, while the company's ebitda for the 2016 full year was a loss of $3.142 billion. The primary drivers of the net loss were noncash impairments of the carrying value of Chesapeake's oil and natural gas properties totaling $2.520 billion, largely resulting from decreases in the trailing 12-month average first-day-of-the-month oil and natural gas prices used in the company's impairment calculations, Barnett Shale exit costs of approximately $645 million and unrealized hedging losses of $818 million as prices marginally recovered. Adjusting for these and other items that are typically excluded by securities analysts, the 2016 full year adjusted net loss available to common stockholders was $138 million, or $0.05 per common share, while the company's adjusted ebitda was $1.339 billion in the 2016 full year.
As well I already pointed out that in 2016 they dropped their overall debt by ~50%. With their current adjusted EBITDA a reasonable estimate of carrying costs on the remaining debt would be somewhere less than 10% which is certainly manageable if prices don't drop below current level for the rest of the year.