Antero Resources Spent $1B in WV Last Year, Another $1B This Year
Antero Resources is seriously in love with West Virginia. Antero is headquartered in Denver, CO but is totally focused on drilling for natural gas, NGLs and oil in the Marcellus/Utica. Antero owns over 484,000 net acres in the southwestern portion of the Marcellus Shale, and over 137,000 net acres in the core of the Utica Shale. Most of their acreage is in WV. Of the $1.3 billion the company spent last year, and plans to spend again this year, around $1 billion (per year) is spent on drilling in WV–close to 80%. Over the next five years, Antero says it will invest $6 billion in the Mountain State. That’s some serious love! As the technology gets better, it takes less time to drill. Antero said it used to take 30 days to drill an 8,000-foot well. Today? They can do it in one day. One of the secrets to Antero’s success in WV is their new Clearwater facility that recycles 98% of the frack wastewater (flowback and produced water) coming from Antero’s wells. Below is an article in which Antero gushes about their love (and future plans) for WV…
Read More “Antero Resources Spent $1B in WV Last Year, Another $1B This Year”
Is it free speech to make “false, destructive and defamatory statements” about a company and the project it proposes to build? Is it OK to pretend to be a news organization when you’re really just a shill for Big Green groups, and is your “speech” protected–when it’s false? Members of the Seneca Indian tribe and faux news outlet Public Herald have been put on notice, legally, by lawyers representing the proposed Epiphany shale wastewater recycling facility in Coudersport (Potter County, PA) and driller JKLM to “cease and desist” from their slandering, smearing false statements about the Epiphany project–statements that are misleading the public. Those served the legal notice say it’s an attempt to silence their free speech rights. What do you think?…
Cabot Oil & Gas, one of our favorite Marcellus drillers, has just published a new PowerPoint slide deck presentation as part of an investor’s conference they attended earlier this week (the Scotia Howard Weil Energy Conference). Normally a new slide deck isn’t all that big a deal. However, thanks to MDN friend Chris Acker who pointed it out to us, there is some new information in the deck worthy of note. Back in December MDN brought you the news that Cabot had signed a deal to sell off their Texas Eagle Ford Shale assets in order to concentrate solely on the Marcellus (see 
If you hang around the business world long enough (as we have), you notice certain trends. One such trend from yesteryear is companies integrating up and down the supply chain. Like when a widget manufacturing company buys the company that supplies it the raw materials used to make the widgets. Example: a car manufacturer buys the company that supplies it with plastic dashboards–and then buys the chemical company that produces the plastic to make the dashboards. And then the same car company, on the other side, buys the credit union that makes the loans to buy their cars! The company becomes integrated. But then the pendulum swings and in recent years, the trend has been about dis-integrating–spinning things off into their own self-contained units. Better to focus on one thing and do it well, rather than be like GE and spread yourself around to multiple industries and specialties. In the oil and gas world, Chesapeake Energy once owned its own oilfield services company (Chesapeake Oilfield Services)–which they later sold. One thing you don’t hear much about is shale companies vertically integrating and buying suppliers. However, Antero Resources, one of the biggest and best drillers in the Marcellus/Utica, is actively considering such a move. Antero wants to buy its own frac sand company as a way of controlling costs. Is it a good idea, or a bad idea?…
Eclipse Resources, a Marcellus/Utica pure play driller headquartered in State College, PA, has just done it again. The company has drilled another massively long onshore lateral–19,335 feet long–in the Ohio Utica. It’s not the longest onshore lateral in the world (currently the Eclipse Outlaw well, at 19,600 feet), but this one comes close. Although drilling a new super lateral is big news, there was other news that (for us) is even bigger: Eclipse issued a statement yesterday that says, in part, the company “has initiated a process to evaluate and consider a full range of potential strategic, operational and financial alternatives to maximize shareholder value.” Eclipse hired investment firm Jefferies LLC and international law firm Norton Rose Fulbright to help with the process. Both firms specialize in mergers and acquisitions (M&A). The statement also says, “There is no assurance that the review by the Board will result in a transaction or other strategic alternative,” which we interpret to mean Eclipse is looking either to buy another company (like EQT did with Rice Energy), or sell itself to another company (like Rice Energy did to EQT). That’s our take on this seemingly innocuous announcement. Big news indeed!…
A debate is playing out in West Pike Run Township in Washington County, PA (near Pittsburgh) that we find interesting. A quick PA history lesson: Back in 2012 PA passed the Act 13 law to update oil and gas regulations to account for shale drilling. One of the updates was a uniform set of zoning requirements to protect residents and the environment. Unfortunately, seven selfish townships sued and eventually won (at the PA Supreme Court) challenging those regulations. So PA towns won the right to impose restrictions on drilling activities. In West Pike Run, the debate is over “setbacks”–how far does a well have to be from nearby structures, like homes and barns and businesses. State law imposes a minimum of 500 feet from the wellhead to an “occupied” structure–and 300 feet from the well to a body of water. In West Pike Run, antis want to up that number to 1,000 feet, which would effectively prevent any more drilling by EQT, the primary driller in the township. The town recently held a hearing on the proposed 1,000 foot setback, a hearing which has been continued to a future meeting on April 16…
Common sense has broken out in Monroeville. Either that, or fear of litigation. Either way, Monroeville (Allegheny County, PA) has rolled back an overly-restrictive zoning ordinance meant to hassle Huntley & Huntley’s plans to drill wells in the township–the very same township where H&H has its headquarters. Last October, Monroeville Council passed a temporary ban on oil and gas well drilling everywhere except for those areas marked M-2 industrial zoning–a big change (see 
Last Friday MDN editor Jim Willis had the pleasure of speaking at the National Association of Royalty Owners (NARO) Pennsylvania Chapter annual convention in State College, PA. Jim was humbled to present alongside a cast of terrific speakers, including Scott Perry, Deputy Secretary of the Office of Oil and Gas Management at the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection, Tom Murphy, Director of Penn State’s Marcellus Center of Outreach and Research (MCOR), and Scott Kurkoski, a top lawyer and head of the energy practice for Levene, Gouldin & Thompson (thanks for the ride home Scott!). One of the first attendees at the event to stop by the MDN table for a chat asked if we had heard about a letter recently sent by EQT to PA landowners. We had not. He gave us a copy (below). In the letter, EQT claims they have been “subsidizing a portion of the cost to gather the gas” produced by their PA wells, and they intend to begin claiming new deductions from royalty checks beginning this year. The way they position it in the letter is that landowners will begin “sharing” in these post-production costs. Who doesn’t like to share, right? We can tell you, not a single attendee at the event was impressed with EQT’s “sharing” letter. It smacks of the road Chesapeake Energy has gone down in robbing landowners of their royalties…
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) has just amended an existing lease with EQT that allows EQT to extract natural gas (and other hydrocarbons) from underneath the Monongahela River in Allegheny, Greene, Fayette, Washington and Westmoreland counties. EQT is paying $4,000 per acre for 392 acres ($1.568 million total) in a signing bonus, along with a big 20% royalty on anything produced. However, the announcement raises an important question we’ve asked for more than four years: Is the land under rivers and streams actually owned by the state? PA says yes. We suspect landowners who own land along those rivers and streams would say otherwise. The state grabbing money for land under bodies of water has been going on for years (see 
On Feb. 15, XTO Energy was drilling a Utica Shale well on the Schnegg well pad near Captina Creek (York Township, Belmont County, OH) when they “lost control” of the well and it exploded and caught fire (see 
We have to confess this story is a bit complex to understand. We will take a stab at making the complex understandable. Blue Racer Midstream has a subsidiary called Blue Racer NGL Pipelines LLC. The subsidiary operates the G-150 pipeline system, which provides batched propane and butane service. G-150 currently, located in West Virginia, connects a Natrium, WV processing plant to the TE Products Pipeline Co. (TEPPCO). The G-150 pipeline will also have a connection to the Mariner East 2 Pipeline when it goes into service, theoretically in June of this year. Currently the G-150 is flowing about 6,300 barrels per day of product through it–only 20% of its capacity. When the connection with ME2 is up and running, Blue Racer says it can handle 30,000 bbl/d through the G-150. However, Blue Racer itself signed up for most of the capacity (27,000 bbl/d). Blue Racer recently asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to allow it to have two different rate structures–a lower rate for “committed” shippers (Blue Racer itself with its 27,000 bbl/d) and a higher rate for uncommitted shippers. FERC rejected the request pointing out that existing shippers with contracts–namely Chesapeake Energy–would be left out in the cold in favor of Blue Racer moving its own volumes at lower prices. Yes, it’s complicated. Bottom line, Blue Racer can’t do what it wants and has to go back to the drawing board…
Private equity firm EnerVest owns a lot of acreage and wells (most of them conventional) in the Marcellus/Utica region. In addition to investing in land and wells, EnerVest also has its own upstream (i.e. drilling) subsidiary, EV Energy Partners (EVEP), with operations and assets in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. EVEP is an MLP–a master limited partnership. While EVEP is joined at the hip with EnerVest, they are (on paper) two different companies. EnerVest has vast holdings and is in the top 25 oil & gas companies in the nation. Last July the Wall Street Journal ran a story that said EnerVest was worth nothing on paper (see