Big news concerning Energy Corporation of America (ECA), a privately owned company founded in 1963 with corporate headquarters in Denver, CO. The company owns (or rather owned) and operated approximately 4,600 (mostly vertical) wells, 5,000 miles of pipeline, and leases more than 1 million acres in North America–most of it in Appalachia. We spotted a press release yesterday that says ArcLight Capital has acquired substantially all of ECA’s natural gas production and pipeline assets. But here’s where it gets interesting. ArcLight has set up a subsidiary called Greylock Energy, which will own the assets–all of the ECA natgas/pipeline assets will go to Greylock. The former CEO of ECA, Kyle Mork, will become the CEO of Greylock. Many (most?) of top management from ECA will become part of Greylock. The existing ECA palatial headquarters building we told you about back in 2014 (see ECA’s New Regional HQ in Charleston: More WV Drilling on the Way?) will become the new HQ for Greylock. In other words, it’s all still ECA, but there’s a new nameplate on the door. So what really happened? What happened, according to an MDN source, is that ECA did something akin to what we’ve seen a number of times before: they converted debt into equity (ownership) and shafted existing shareholders out of millions of dollars. Except in this case we’re not sure ECA actually had large debts. There’s no way to know since it’s a private company. But the pattern is the same. ECA gave the keys to new owners, leaving the previous owners (i.e. shareholders) standing on the curb…
