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Cabot Letter to EPA: You Need to Rethink Dimock Decision

rethinkCabot Oil & Gas President & CEO Dan Dinges sent a letter yesterday to federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson about the EPA’s sudden change of plans concerning the situation in Dimock, PA (the full letter is embedded below). The upshot of the letter? You need to rethink your recent decision to interfere in Dimock.

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Obama Takes Credit for Shale Gas Drilling in Election Year

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this week (We Don’t Need More Foreign Oil and Gas), Obama supporters and long-time Democrat flacks John Podesta and Tom Steyer tried to make the argument that we don’t need Canada’s oil (and natural gas) because we now have enough of our own, thank you very much. Apparently Obama is getting heat for his disastrous decision to pander to environmental extremists and reject the Keystone XL pipeline that would not only have brought cheap Canadian oil to the U.S. (at a time of record-highs for oil), but also would have brought more U.S. oil to the U.S. from North Dakota’s Bakken field.

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EQT Production Up 44% in 2011, Suspends Huron Shale Drilling

Pittsburgh-based EQT Corp. released 2011 results yesterday. Because of the prolific gas volumes in the Marcellus Shale, EQT reports production for natural gas was up an astonishing 44 percent over 2010. Some 42 percent of EQT’s production is from the Marcellus, which was up 18.9 percent last year.

EQT reports drilling 222 gross wells in 2011, 105 of them in the Marcellus Shale and 115 in the Huron Shale. The Huron is located mostly in western West Virginia, with very small slices in Ohio, Kentucky and Virginia. Because of slumping prices for natural gas, EQT has announced they are suspending drilling in the Huron and instead will concentrate on the liquids-rich portion of the Marcellus.

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CONSOL Will Spend $130M Less on Marcellus Drilling in 2012

CONSOL Energy, the coal and natural gas giant with drilling operations in the Marcellus and Utica Shales, released it’s fourth quarter results along with a year-in-review yesterday. Even though the price of natural gas steadily declined during 2011, CONSOL was able to pay off all of its short term debt and ended the year with a cash balance of $376 million. CONSOL spent $1.4 billion on capital projects in 2011 and paid out dividends to shareholders totaling $96 million. The company has increased its regular quarterly dividend by 25 percent. The annual dividend is now $0.50 per share.

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