Is Brigham Exploration Co. (NASDAQ:BEXP) serious about selling?

The stock of the Austin, Texas, oil and gas explorer went wild after its CEO Bud Brigham spoke at a conference last week, saying the company was talking with interested parties. It jumped 5.6% to $19.99 per share that day and ended the week at $21.24, a 52-week high.

It wouldn't be surprising if the company went up for sale. North Dakota's Bakken shale, where Brigham operates, has been a hot area for deal activity recently, with three deals worth $895 million announced in the third quarter, according to Houston energy transactions research firm PLS Inc. The deals include Enerplus Resources Fund's (NYSE:ERF) $456 million purchase of assets from undisclosed sellers last month and Hess Corp.'s (NYSE:HES) purchase of American Oil and Gas Inc. in July for $445 million. The area is full of oil -- as much as 4 billion barrels technically recoverable, with even more below it in the so-called Three Forks-Sanish formation -- which is fetching a much higher relative price than natural gas. New horizontal drilling technologies have allowed oil and gas explorers to get at it more easily.

Other companies that operate in the Bakken include Enid, Okla.-based Continental Resources Inc. (NYSE:CLR), which has taken a lead in the play with more than 800,000 acres (making its 64-year-old CEO and founder, Harold Hamm, a billionaire, by Forbes magazine's most recent reckoning). Credo Petroleum Corp. (NASDAQ:CRED) of Denver is also a big player with 6,000 net acres "in the nation's most exciting oil resource play," CEO Marlis Smith said recently. Whiting Petroleum Corp. (NYSE:WLL) is also active in the area.

But what did Brigham's comments really mean? Companies routinely talk but don't necessarily enter into transactions, Global Hunter Securities LLC noted in an Oct. 8 report. Larger companies would benefit from Brigham's Bakken position and all its data surrounding it, but the firm says it's heard rumors of valuation being a stumbling block. According to Global Hunter, a company could buy Brigham at $25 and still generate a go-forward 25% internal rate of return on the investment based on an eight-rig program, although it would assume a buyer would accelerate the drilling beyond that. If the company was sold at $35 per share, the buyer could generate a 15% IRR, which would be enhanced by higher commodity prices and acceleration. At $35 per share, the company would fetch $4 billion -- a drop in the bucket for large companies like Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE:XOM), Chevron Corp. (NYSE:CVX) or ConocoPhillips Co. (NYSE:COP), which might want to get into the Bakken in a bigger way.