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Weekly Shale Drilling Permits for PA, OH, WV: Jan 11-15
Two of three M-U drilling states received permits last week. Pennsylvania scored 14 permits to drill new shale wells. Ohio received no new permits for Utica wells. West Virginia received 5 new permits to drill new shale wells.
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EQT Corporation, the largest natural gas producer in the United States, is asking West Virginia officials to remove two judges from hearing cases brought by landowners against the EQT relating to royalty disputes for alleged improper deductions. EQT wants Judges Timothy Sweeney and David W. Hummel Jr. to be disqualified from at least three cases (that we know of).
It’s been a long road, but we’re nearing the end. Shell’s $6 billion ethane cracker plant, officially called the Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex (PPC), is close to being done. It’s likely the PPC, located in Beaver County, PA, will be up and running sometime next year. When it is, the market for Marcellus/Utica NGLs will profoundly change. PPC will use an average of 85,000 barrels per day of M-U ethane. Our ethane will no longer be a waste product that many drillers pay to get rid of, but rather a profitable product they sell.
Over the objections of a junior creditor group, a judge for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston said yesterday he will approve Chesapeake Energy’s bankruptcy plan to jettison $7 billion (out of $8.9 billion) worth of debt. Chesapeake will exit bankruptcy within the next 30 days and will continue to retain and drill on its Marcellus Shale assets in northeastern Pennsylvania.
In a pair of announcements earlier this week, U.S. Well Services announced it has signed new long-term deals with both Range Resources and EQT to supply “electric fracking” services. We told you in February 2020 that Range had signed on with U.S. Well Services to continue using its electric fracking service (see 
The Community College of Beaver County’s (CCBC) Shell Center for Process Technology, a $5 million state-of-the-art training facility, has just officially opened. While the Center was built to train employees to run the Shell ethane cracker plant, it’s also training people for a myriad of other opportunities too.
Late last week Shell shut down all work at its ethane cracker plant site in Monaca (Beaver County), PA to test workers for COVID-19. After testing roughly 7,400 (out of 7,950) workers Shell found 141 positive results, or 1.9%. Workers began returning to the site on Wednesday.
The Marcellus/Utica is the #1 natural gas producing play in the country. Last month the M-U region produced 33.6 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d), according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s December Drilling Productivity Report (see 
As we entered 2020, the stock price for most Marcellus/Utica drillers was near or even at the lowest it had ever been (see 