Southwestern 2Q – 2.2 Bcfe/d Production, $505/Ft Well Cost!
Southwestern Energy released its 2Q20 update on Friday. The company, with nearly a half-million acres under lease, drills solely in the Marcellus/Utica in two distinct regions: northeastern Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The NEPA operation targets dry gas. WV targets wet gas/NGLs. During 2Q, Southwestern drilled 80% of its new wells in the NEPA dry gas area. Southwestern drilled 30 new wells, completed/fracked 31 wells, and placed 31 wells online to sales last quarter. One of the eye-popping bits of news from the company update is that for one particular well they hit a super-low $505/lateral foot cost to drill the well–the lowest drilling cost we’ve seen by any M-U driller anywhere!
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Antero Resources issued its 2Q20 update yesterday. Even though the company averaged a sales price of $2.81/Mcf (thousand cubic feet) for natural gas it sold last quarter by using hedging (at a time when the price has been bumping around $1.70/Mcf), low gas prices clobbered the company. Antero saw a net loss of $463 million for the quarter. However, the company did set a new onshore drilling record for the longest well drilled in a 24-hour period–11,253 lateral feet drilled in 24 hours.
CNX Resources issued its 2Q20 update yesterday. The company reports a $146 million net loss. Production in 2Q20 was 114.5 Bcfe (billion cubic feet equivalent), down from 134.5 Bcfe in 2Q19 due to curtailments. Average daily production in 2Q was 1.26 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day), down from 1.35 Bcf/d a year earlier. The company shut-in some of its production due to COVID and low prices. They will restore all shut-in production by November.
Yesterday MDN brought you the news that CNX Resources is buying out the balance of what they don’t own in their pipeline subsidiary CNX Midstream (see 
We love a story about an individual or company that defies conventional wisdom and succeeds by charting its own course separate from the herd. Diversified Gas & Oil (DGO) is one such company. DGO buys up older conventional (and shale) wells in Appalachia, making money off the “long tail” of low production (see 
How does one make money in the natural gas market these days when the price of gas is at historic lows? One way is if an investor was fortunate enough to bet the price would go down. Those folks made money. The other way is to…invest in drillers? Yep. Even though low prices hurt drillers, investors still like the looks of what is on the horizon, especially for companies operating in the Marcellus/Utica. Example: The stock price for Range Resources and EQT is up over 30% each this year so far.
EQT, the country’s largest natural gas-producing company, issued its second-quarter 2020 update yesterday. There was a lot of news coming from the update. First and foremost, CEO Toby Rice (celebrating his one-year anniversary after taking over management of the company) said that the 1.4 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of gas production previously curtailed (shut-in) starting in May is, as of the beginning of July, fully restored and flowing with no apparent “degradation” in the performance of the shut-in wells. However, it was other remarks–about Equitrans and the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP)–that caught our attention.
CNX Midstream began life as a joint venture between CONSOL Energy (the forerunner to CNX Resources) and Noble Energy, and was called CONE Midstream (“CO” from CONSOL and “NE” from Noble Energy). Noble decided to completely exit the Marcellus/Utica and ended up selling their half of CONE to CNX for $305 million in early 2018 (see 
On Friday the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) announced it has fined CNX Resources and its subsidiary CNX Midstream $310,000 for two incidents in which 65 barrels (2,730 gallons) of non-toxic brine (salty water) leaked into the ground and 43 gallons of non-toxic drilling mud leaked into a creek. The DEP says CNX did “not adequately maintain erosion and sedimentation best management practices.”
Terry Pegula is a billionaire who owns both the Buffalo Sabres (NHL hockey team) and the Buffalo Bills (NFL football team). Pegula is the owner of East Resources, once a big driller (and holder of acreage) in the Marcellus Shale. Pegula sold off East’s Marcellus assets and used the money, in part, to buy the Buffalo Bills in 2014, which gave rise to MDN calling the team “the Marcellus Bills”–since it was Marcellus money that kept the team in Buffalo, instead of moving to another market (see 
Montage Resources, the new name for the merger of Eclipse Resources with Blue Ridge Mountain Resources which happened more than a year ago, announced yesterday it is selling its “non-core” wellhead gathering infrastructure (pipelines) in the Ohio Utica condensate development area to an unnamed international buyer for $25 million. The transaction is expected to close by the end of this year.
Last year Chevron tried to buy Permian driller Anadarko Petroleum for $50 billion. Occidental Petroleum swooped in at the last minute and lured Anadarko away in a $57 billion deal. Chevron left the marriage altar with a cool $1 billion in breakup fees (see 
Last week we brought you news that Shell had temporarily suspended adding back some 300 workers per week at its ethane cracker construction site in Beaver County, PA following a spike in COVID-19 coronavirus cases (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 
When the COVID-19 coronavirus hit, Shell stopped all work on its mighty cracker plant in Beaver County, PA, sending nearly 8,000 workers home in mid-March for what was thought to be “a few days to a few weeks” (see