EQT Buys Chevron M-U Assets for $735M, Floats $350M in New Stock
Looks like the rumors were true, at least one of them. Yesterday EQT announced it has cut a deal to buy Chevron’s considerable Appalachian assets for $735 million. The Reuters rumor from September said EQT had offered $750 million (see Sources: EQT Offering $750M for Chevron’s Marcellus/Utica Assets). Also yesterday, EQT floated up to 23 million new shares of stock, on offer for $15.50 per share, attempting to raise ~$350 million to use toward the Chevron purchase.
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For a second week in a row, all three M-U states issued new shale drilling permits last week. Pennsylvania issued 6 new permits, Ohio issued 5 new permits, and West Virginia issued 3 new permits.
We don’t know how Pittsburgh Business Times ace reporter Paul Gough does it. Yesterday we told you Gough had gotten CNX CEO Nick DeIuliis to, in a roundabout way, discuss the rumor that EQT has floated a takeover offer to his company (see 
Bloomberg is reporting insider sources say EQT, already the biggest natural gas producer in the country (and pureplay driller in the Marcellus/Utica), has sent a takeover proposal to CNX Resources, another major Marcellus/Utica driller. Friendly? Hostile? Who knows. In September inside sources told Reuters that EQT had made a bid on Chevron’s extensive M-U acreage (see 
Although the big news from yesterday is that EQT is rumored to be eyeing a takeover of CNX Resources (see our lead story today), EQT released its third-quarter 2020 update yesterday with news almost as big. EQT previously announced it is looking to sell its right to ship gas along the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP). Yesterday the company said it believes a sale of its MVP capacity will happen by the end of this year.
We are on the cusp of the quarterly earnings reports issued by all publicly-traded companies. In fact, EQT, the largest natural gas-producing company in the U.S., released their numbers and held a conference call this morning (we’ll report on it tomorrow). As Marcellus/Utica drillers get ready to release their third-quarter numbers, analysts on Wall Street are signaling what they want to see.
We spotted a couple of stories, one in Barron’s the other in the Wall Street Journal, about the pickup in the futures price of natural gas over the past week, and how those recent gains have led to impressive gains in the share price for Marcellus/Utica drillers. Yesterday the NYMEX Henry Hub futures price closed up 4.11% to $2.74/Mcf. The rising tide lifts all boats.
Last December Chevron announced it was writing down over $10 billion worth of its U.S. onshore shale assets, with $6.5 billion of that number coming from its Marcellus/Utica assets. Also in December, the company posted for sale ALL of their M-U assets (see 
What started out as a spat between two companies that used to be one and the same, EQT and Equitrans, has quickly turned into open warfare that’s heading for court. We’re talking about the flap over whether or not EQT has the right to buy out Equitrans’ Hammerhead pipeline, and turn around and sell it, as EQT is now trying to do (see 
There’s trouble brewing in EQT-land. Once upon a time, EQT was both a producer (drilling) and midstream (pipeline) company. But then so-called activist investors forced the company (after its merger with Rice Energy) to split in two–drilling and pipelines. The split happened in November 2018 (see 
In mid-May the nation’s largest natural gas producer, EQT Corporation, temporarily shut-in (curtailed) roughly one-third of its natural gas production in Pennsylvania and Ohio (see