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34 New Shale Well Permits Issued for PA-OH-WV Jun 13-19
We finally started to see more permits issued again last week. After the Marcellus/Utica was in the permit doldrum for nearly a month, bumping around at 20 permits or below, last week the number increased to a total of 34 permits issued to drill new shale wells. Pennsylvania issued 13 new permits, with seven of them going to Coterra Energy in Susquehanna County on the same pad. Ohio issued 14 new permits, with 12 of them going to Ascent Resources distributed across four different counties. And West Virginia issued seven new permits, all of them to Antero Resources, all in Doddridge County.
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The stock market is off to a shaky start in 2022. Retirement accounts of all types–401(k)s, IRAs, etc.–have chart trend lines going in the wrong direction. Fears over persistently high inflation, aggressive Federal Reserve interest rate hikes, and Russia’s unprovoked and murderous war against Ukraine have the S&P 500 down 13.3% through the end of May. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 10.3% year-to-date (YTD). But not every stock is down. Looking at the top 10 stocks for companies with market capitalizations of at least $1 billion, you will find eight of the ten (80%) are fossil fuel companies. In fact, one of the top ten is a pure-play Marcellus/Utica driller!
We spotted a story on The Motley Fool investor’s website yesterday noting that several Marcellus/Utica publicly-traded drillers saw “double-digit” increases in their share price just yesterday, for a single day. The article highlights both Range Resources and Southwestern Energy. We started nosing around to see how the stock price for all of the big publicly-traded M-U drillers has performed this year, from the beginning of the year. It was an eye-opener. ALL of them are up from the beginning of the year. Most are up at least 75% in value since Jan. 1. A few have doubled in value, now up more than 100% since Jan. 1. We have the list below for how each one performed. Welcome to the bull market in oil and gas!
An article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette highlights and focuses on the financial performance for four of the Marcellus/Utica’s largest publicly-traded companies, including EQT Corp., Antero Resources, Range Resources, and CNX Resources, during first quarter 2022. Even though the price natural gas is fetching is higher than it’s been in 14 years, M-U drillers are losing money. Why? Hedges and derivatives–bad bets on where the price of gas would go and locking in prices much lower than what the market currently supports.
Antero Resources, one of the largest drillers in the Marcellus/Utica (with major assets in West Virginia) issued its first quarter 2022 update yesterday. We’ve often marveled at Antero’s ability to make money on its natural gas and NGLs with hedging–preselling gas and NGLs at prices that beat whatever the current market price is at the time (see 
In a court case that stretches back to 2019, Antero Resources, the biggest driller in West Virginia, challenged how its wells had been valued for tax purposes in Doddridge and Richie counties for 2016 and 2017. Antero said the combined value of its wells for those years should have been $1.488 billion. The state tax commissioner reckoned the value to be $1.513 billion. The controversy of well valuations not only for Antero but other drillers led to a reworking of how the state law values shale wells (see 
One of the hottest of the hot sectors in which to invest (right now) is shale energy. That’s according to multiple sources, including a veteran finance writer, investor, engineer, and researcher. In an article appearing on the OilPrice.com website, Alex Kimani talks up mid-cap energy stocks as outperforming the supermajors. Among two of Kimani’s top three picks are two Marcellus/Utica drillers, who are having a stellar year in stock performance. We went looking for the stock performance of other M-U drillers too. We have a list to share showing just how much each driller’s share price has increased this year.
Since Russia illegally and immorally invaded Ukraine on February 24, the stock price for Marcellus/Utica natural gas drillers has skyrocketed based on the fear that Russia will cut off natural gas to Europe in response to their response to the war (sanctions on Russia). The Russia/Ukraine war has stoked concerns that Europe will need much more natgas from the U.S. and therefore the U.S. will have to drill and pump more gas to supply it, making gas drillers an attractive investment.