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Weekly Shale Drilling Permits for PA, OH, WV: Dec 21-Jan 1
We’re catching up the permits issued over the past two weeks (prior to this week). Pennsylvania issued 11 permits during that time, and West Virginia issued 3 permits. Ohio issued no new shale drilling permits over the past two weeks.
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A well in the Marcellus Shale in (of all places) Plum Borough in Allegheny County, PA (a suburb of Pittsburgh) has become the longest onshore lateral drilled in the Marcellus Shale. Olympus Energy (formerly Huntley & Huntley Exploration) has drilled and completed a well with a 20,060-foot lateral–3.8 miles long!
In March 2019 MDN told you about National Fuel Gas Company’s (NFG) FM100 Project in northwestern Pennsylvania that will beef up and extend an existing pipeline network to flow an extra 330 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of Marcellus gas to Williams’ mighty Transco Pipeline (see 
Oaktree Capital Management, a huge investment firm with 1,000 employees and $140 billion in assets under management, is investing some of its considerable stach in BKV Corporation. BKV (which stands for Banpu Kalnin Ventures) is the American shale drilling arm of Banpu, Thailand’s largest coal mining company. BKV/Banpu has invested ~$500 million in the PA Marcellus, going as far as building a regional office in northeastern PA a year ago (see 
This is rich. The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) took its sweet time reviewing a permit application to drill a series of Marcellus Shale wells on the property of U.S. Steel Corp.’s Edgar Thomson steel mill. Because the DEP delayed its review for so long, in October the East Pittsburgh Borough Zoning Board revoked a local permit previously granted for the project in 2017 (see 
Capital expense (capex) investments made by drillers in the Marcellus/Utica during the third quarter of 2020 were the lowest in at least six years according to a new report (full copy below) from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). The report looks at nine of the top drillers in the M-U and finds collectively they cut capex investment by more than one-third in 3Q20 over 3Q19. And yet those same nine collectively spent a half-billion dollars more during 3Q on drilling and building projects than they earned in revenue from selling oil and gas. That’s troubling.
While so-called “activist investors” can sometimes accomplish good things (like the Rice boys in their takeover of EQT last year), it is our observation that most “activist investors” are destructive. A new hedge fund calling itself Engine No. 1 is one such destructive company. The hedge fund, based in San Francisco (which explains a lot) has ExxonMobil in its sights, attempting a hostile takeover of the company by getting four of its own candidates named to the board, and after that, forcing Exxon (an oil company) to forsake oil drilling and focus on “clean energy.”
Yesterday CNX CEO Nick Deluliis was one of the keynote speakers at the annual DUG (Developing Unconventional Gas) East event, held virtually this year. Normally DUG is held at the Convention Center in Pittsburgh. Deluliis’ talk was wide-ranging, but much of it concentrated on mergers and acquisitions, particularly M&A in the Marcellus/Utica. Deluliis is not much interested in horizontal M&A for CNX, but he is intrigued by vertical M&A.