Toby Rice Hosts 2Q EQT Meeting, Lots of New Faces Appear
Yesterday the new EQT management team, in particular CEO Toby Rice, held a conference call with stock analysts to discuss the company’s second quarter financial and operational update. We learned a number of things from the call and materials published by EQT: A number of new faces have appeared in senior management; the company remains committed to sister company Equitrans and its Mountain Valley Pipeline project; and EQT’s second-quarter net income jumped more than 700% from a year ago–something previous CEO Rob McNally can take credit for.
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We caught wind of something on the Tallgrass quarterly conference call yesterday that had previously eluded our otherwise reliable radar. Tallgrass, via its subsidiary BNN Water, bought out and merged in Central Environmental Services back in May. That’s important because Central is a “water services” provider in the Marcellus/Utica. Namely, Central (now BNN) operates three injection wells in Ohio. On yesterday’s Tallgrass conference call, company officials said they are working on a plan to build pipelines to those injection wells, saving a whole bunch of truck trips.
Steven Winberg, the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s assistant secretary for fossil energy, spoke to West Virginia lawmakers on Tuesday. His message? The Trump Administration is prioritizing building out a petrochemical industry in Appalachia. Among Winberg’s comments, on the matter of establishing an NGL storage hub in Appalachia, he said: “At DOE we have a full court press on this.” For those who don’t follow basketball, the term full court press means aggressive pressure against the opponent in the back court. Winberg’s meaning: DOE is doing everything it can to make the NGL storage hub project happen.
It’s hard to miss the stories in oil and gas (even national) media: Company after company, in particular oilfield services companies, are predicting a big slowdown in drilling during the second half of 2019. Over the past few days OFS companies including Schlumberger, Halliburton, Patterson-UTI, Superior Energy Services, Helmerich & Payne, and RPC have all predicted a coming decline (crash?) in drilling in the near future. What about the Marcellus/Utica region? Does the coming slowdown affect us too?
On Monday MDN brought you the news that Range Resources has sold a 2% overriding royalty interest on 350,000 acres “in southwest Appalachia” for $600 million (see 
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper has engaged in a months-long smear campaign to imply the shale industry in southwestern PA is guilty of causing a “cluster” of rare childhood cancers–even though there’s an old uranium dump in the same vicinity as those cancer clusters (see 
U.S. Senator from Mississippi John Wicker (Republican), and Congressman John Garimendi from wacko California (Democrat), have re-introduced a really bad bill euphemistically called Energizing American Shipbuilding Act. We’ve extensively covered the 1920 Jones Act that prevents any shipping from one U.S. port to another unless the ship is *built* and *owned* by Americans. The Jones Act prevents us from shipping homegrown LNG to any ports because there are not big LNG carries made here in the U.S. (see 
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: NYC mayor suggests ConEd takeover after heat forces shutdown; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: TECO coal to natural gas conversion approved; A lot of new LPG export dock capacity is on the way; NATIONAL: Challenging times for U.S. shale: The industry has seen it all before; The EIA’s July energy report in pictures; Job losses hit as shale slows down; The New York Times says heat waves are getting worse…the National Climate Assessment disagrees.