MarkWest Gets New CEO, New Processing Plants Coming in M-U
Last week Marathon Petroleum, the parent company of MPLX (formerly called MarkWest Energy) announced some big changes during their third quarter update. Namely, they have caved to “activist” investors (we still call them corporate raiders) and their demands to split the company and dump the current CEO (see Partial Activist Victory: Marathon to Sell Speedway, CEO Retiring). The one thing activists didn’t get was a commitment to sell off the MarkWest/MPLX division. What we overlooked at the time (correcting it now) is the fairly big news that the MPLX division got a new CEO, and they continue to build new natural gas and NGL processing plants in the Marcellus/Utica region.
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In 2011 Ohio Gov. John Kasich (RINO) signed into law a provision to create the Ohio Oil and Gas Leasing Commission, a group to oversee drilling and fracking on state-owned land. Then Kasich refused to appoint members to the five-member commission, effectively skirting the law and imposing his own whacked moratorium on drilling on state-owned land. Why? Punishment for the industry refusing to endorse his obscene high severance tax rate. In 2017 under threat by the Republican legislature, Kasich finally relented and appointed the five members (see 
Do Rhode Island regulators read MDN? Maybe! On Monday we brought you a post about the coming natural gas outages like that experienced last January in the People’s Republic of Rhode Island, due to eco-socialist pressure to ban new natural gas infrastructure (see 
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Yesterday MDN brought you news about Chesapeake Energy and their third quarter update (see 
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The smart folks at IHS Markit, a global analytics company that tracks data in the oil and gas industry, are predicting a major slowdown in shale oil production in 2020, and essentially no growth in production for 2021. Although this prediction, based on evidence and the intuition of people who study this stuff is about shale oil, the prediction *does* relate to the Marcellus/Utica as well.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Natural gas forecast 2020: 6.2 trillion reasons to love Pennsylvania; ODNR issues 6 permits for Utica drilling; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: We Energies, Wisconsin Gas seek to spend $370 million on 2 plants to store natural gas; No natural gas? If that happens, California will dump Democrats; NATIONAL: Potential federal drilling bans ‘fraught with serious economic ramifications,’ says Devon CEO; Exxon slams NY AG’s ‘circular’ analysis in climate trial; Obama’s former EPA chief takes the helm of environmental group that’s sued Trump nearly 100 times; INTERNATIONAL: EIA projects energy consumption in air transportation to increase through 2050; Total-Adani deal signals robust investment appetite in gas ‘sweet spot’ India; OPEC sees flood of U.S. shale barrels hurting demand for its crude oil.