EQT to Spend $1.1B on Marcellus Drilling in 2014, $145M on Utica
EQT, one of the largest drillers in the Marcellus Shale, released their 2014 “guidance” (what we’ll do next year) update yesterday. And boy oh boy is it a duesy for the Marcellus. EQT says they’ll spend an eye-popping $1.1 billion and drill 186 Marcellus Shale wells in 2014. In the Utica Shale, EQT plans to spend $145 million and drill 21 wells. EQT will actually spend more money to drill in the Upper Devonian Shale layer than the Utica: $155 million to drill 30 wells in the UD.
EQT will spend the vast majority of it’s planned $1.9 billion in capital expenditures in the northeast in 2014. Here’s the update with full details:
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Who doesn’t like a Top 10? We have one for you: What are the Top 10 producing Marcellus Shale wells in Pennsylvania? Would it surprise you to learn that 8 of the top 10 wells are found in a single PA county, drilled by the same driller?
The recently signed Pennsylvania Royalty Bill SB259 provides extra transparency for landowners in how royalties are calculated, but it also introduces forced pooling for some landowners with old, pre-Marcellus leases (see 
It seems as if “out of the blue” the Upper Devonian Shale (UD) has popped up on the radar screen–quite suddenly and in quite a big way. The Upper Devonian is located a few hundred feet above the Marcellus Shale layer in the northeastern U.S. Over the past few weeks, MDN has highlighted stories of drillers expanding their UD drilling programs–including CONSOL, Rex Energy, Range Resources and EQT Corporation (see 
EQT has distinguished itself by becoming the second Marcellus Shale driller to join the “1 billion cubic feet per day club” in Marcellus Shale gas production. Cabot Oil & Gas was the first member (see 
Those who hate fossil fuels and want to stop all shale drilling because of their irrational beliefs are logic-challenged. Witness their claim/belief that fracking fluid (99.5% water and sand, 0.5% chemicals) pumped a mile or more below the surface will magically travel up to the surface and contaminate groundwater supplies. Never mind that 80% of the fluid disappears into small cracks a mile down. Never mind there’s a mile of solid rock between the fluid and the surface. Never mind there have been more than 50,000 horizontally fracked wells since the early 2000s with not a single case of water contamination from migrating frack fluid. And never mind there have been more than 2 million vertically fracked wells worldwide over the past 60+ years with not a single case of water contamination from migrating frack fluid. Anti-drillers cling to their irrational faith that fluid migration has and continues to happen and hucksters like Josh Fox of Gasland and Gasland 2 fame are all too willing to feed their delusion.