Carl Icahn Has Lost $633 Million on Chesapeake Gamble…So Far
The firings will continue until morale improves! Or at least until Carl Icahn makes money. Once upon a time corporate raider Carl Icahn was Chesapeake Energy’s second largest investor. Today, he’s the company’s largest investor. Ichan has certainly made his presence know. Using his proxy (we call him a toady) Doug Lawler, the CEO Icahn installed after he ousted founder Aubrey McClendon from that position, Doug “the ax” Lawler went to work (see Chesapeake’s CEO Celebrates Axing 1,200 People Making Carl More $). To hear Chessy people talk (the few that are left) it’s been all butterflies and unicorns. Everything is looking up–except Ichan’s investment. With the downturn in oil and natgas prices, Ichan’s Chesapeake stocks have tanked and his big gamble on Chesapeake isn’t looking so rosy anymore…
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What are the nightmares that keep drillers up at night? Is it the prospect of having to pay big fines, like the biggest fine paid to date in Pennsylvania, announced just last week (see 
Big news from MDN friend and Marcellus/Utica driller Aubrey McClendon. McClendon, now CEO of American Energy Partners (and former CEO of Chesapeake Energy), told a Hart Energy conference yesterday that the companies he’s started since leaving Chesapeake will soon go public–each of them individually. And he’ll start even more companies that will go public. McClendon is adopting a “pure play” approach in which each company will be independently run and focus on a single shale play. Once again McClendon has taken the road less traveled and is pioneering a brilliant strategy to dominate the plays which he chooses to target. MDN’s words when the Chesapeake board dismissed Aubrey (from April 1, 2013) were prophetic: “Why is it an error to show McClendon to the door even in light of his aggressive financial deals? You think McClendon will take his piles of money and sit on a Caribbean beach somewhere? In your dreams! He’ll be back, and he’ll start (or buy) another company that will directly compete with Chesapeake. You can bank on it.” (see 
Without a doubt the biggest story from last week, which broke on MDN’s first day off in our one-week vacation, was the new natural gas production numbers coming from Pennsylvania and the Marcellus Shale. The PA Dept. of Environmental Protection released production numbers for the first six months of 2014, which show that PA produced an incredible 1.94 trillion cubic feet during that period–up 14% from the last half of 2013 (1.697 Tcf), and comparing apples to apples, up an astonishing 38% from the same period a year ago, the first half of 2013 (1.406 Tcf). PA also produced 1.7 million barrels of condensate (or natural gasoline) and 182,000 barrels of oil. Below we list the Top 10 producing wells in 1H14. Would it surprise you to learn that 9 of the top 10 are found in the same county, drilled by one company? We also include the full list of all 7,679 wells drilled so far…
Chesapeake Energy continues to sell off assets in an attempt to boost its stock price and make corporate raider Carl Icahn even richer. The latest fire sale: Rice Energy announced yesterday they’ve picked up 22,000 acres and 12 Marcellus Shale wells from Chessy located in Greene County, PA for $336 million. According to Rice’s President & COO Toby Rice, the acreage is a “high quality” shale asset located in an area they’ve been developing since 2009…
Three years ago Talisman, a driller in the Marcellus Shale (and other shale plays) produced a coloring book for kids. The main character in the book is Talisman Terry. You could hear the gaffaws and laughter from mainstream media, then their righteous indignation that Talisman would “dare” to publish a coloring book that aimed to brainwash little kiddies away from the green religion and bias them toward nasty fossil fuels (see 
We’ve only spotted this news in (so far) two legal publications, but last Friday the Suessenbach Family Limited Partnership, using a Wilkes-Barre, PA law firm, launched a “sprawling class action” lawsuit against Chesapeake Energy and Access Midstream accusing the two companies of a $5 billion scheme to defraud landowners out of royalties rightfully due to them. MDN previously covered how this scheme worked (see