Is Chevron’s $10B Impairment Write-Down Important…or Not?
In a bombshell announcement last week Chevron said it is writing down (reducing the paper value) of all its shale assets by $10-$11 billion in the fourth quarter. “More than half” of the write-down is for its Marcellus/Utica assets (see Chevron Writes Down $5B+ in Marc/Utica Assets, Looks to Sell All). In addition, the company has put all of it’s M-U assets on the market for sale (see Chevron Confirms M-U Assets for Sale, Asks Vendors to Avoid Media). What does a write-down of asset value actually mean? Is it important?
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For months MDN has brought you bits and pieces of news from individual drillers, detailing plans to cut back on spending for new drilling in the Marcellus/Utica in 2020. It’s not just happening in the M-U–it’s happening across the country. The experts at RBN Energy have a terrific new post that pulls information about major drillers scaling back into one place. They analyze spending by three different groups of drillers: oil-focused, diversified, and gas-focused drillers. In the third category, all but one of the gas-focused drillers have major operations in the M-U. The stats are sobering. As a collective group, M-U gas drillers have pledged to cut their 2020 budgets 25% from the already-lower spending that happened this year. Ouch.
West Virginia’s co-tenancy law was signed into law by Gov. Jim Justice in March 2018 (see 
Last week Chesapeake Energy received a notification from the New York Stock Exchange that its shares of stock have fallen below the $1/share threshold for more than 30 consecutive trading days and because of it, Chessy’s stock will be delisted from the exchange. Unless. Unless they can get the per share price over the $1/share average in a certain period of time. Chesapeake has responded they are taking several actions, the most relevant/likely being a reverse stock split.
A leftist anti-fossil group calling itself Protect PT, in Penn Township (Westmoreland County), PA, backed with money from Big Green groups, continues to sue in an effort to block shale drilling in the township. And they keep losing their lawsuits. In November the group lost an appeal of a lower court ruling which challenges a Penn Township ordinance allowing Apex Energy and Huntley & Huntley (now Olympus Energy) to drill and operate wells (see 
On Wednesday MDN told you Chevron is hinting they will sell off all of their Marcellus/Utica assets (see 
In a bombshell announcement yesterday, Chevron said it is writing down (reducing the paper value) of all its shale assets by $10-$11 billion in the fourth quarter. “More than half” of it is a write-down of its Marcellus/Utica assets. Not only that, but Chevron says it is “evaluating its strategic alternatives for these assets, including divestment.” Translation: Chevron has put its M-U assets, all of them (over 
Antero Resources is working hard to get the company on sound financial footing. That’s the message we took away from an announcement on Monday from the company that says (a) they’ve asked for and received a break in midstream (pipeline) prices from their own subsidiary, Antero Midstream, and (b) they’re putting some of their considerable Marcellus/Utica assets up for sale, hoping to raise upward of $1 billion.
As it turns out, Exxon didn’t know. You may recall the hue and cry from radical anti-fossil fuelers that #ExxonKnew–knew they were toasting mom earth by extracting and encouraging the burning of oil and natural gas. The New Attorney General’s office launched an investigation, and then a lawsuit, charging the same thing. The NY AG claimed Exxon had defrauded shareholders by covering up knowledge of global warming. The first lawsuit to go to trial against Exxon for causing global warming was in NY, where the AG (Letitia “Tish” James) headed up a disaster of a lawsuit. She (and her office) was thoroughly and completely humiliated by a NY judge who said she never proved anything. Her team’s performance was worse than that of a first-year law student.
This post catches you up on both some old and some new news. In February of this year Chevron signed a lease with the Pennsylvania Dept. of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) to lease 1,028.4 acres of land *under* the Monongahela River in Greene and Fayette counties (southwestern corner of the state). That’s the old news. The new news is that Chevron has just added another 235.6 acres to the original lease for a grand total of 1,264.3 acres. Chevron is paying DCNR just over $5 million in lease signing bonuses for the entire deal.
In September, Huntley Energy Exploration (HHEX), a conventional and shale driller headquartered in Southpointe (Washington County), PA that leases land and drills in the Pittsburgh suburbs, changed its name to Olympus Energy (see