Gulfport Picks Up 12,600 Utica Acres in Monroe County, OH for $87M
Gulfport Energy reports they have just snagged another 12,600 net undeveloped Utica acres located dry gas window of northern Monroe County, Ohio for $87 million. When you run the math, that works out to be $6,905 per acre–far less than the recent $10,000/acre prices we’ve seen. Half of the acreage is “held by production,” meaning wells have either been drilled or are already producing. Analysts figure the land, which is located next to land already leased by Gulfport, will yield something like 105 new wells for the company. Gulfport is head over heels in love with the Utica and plans, as we noted in November, to run an average of six drilling rigs in the Utica in 2017 (see Gulfport 3Q16 Fin. Update: $157M Loss, 6 Utica Rigs Coming in 2017). Oh, who’s the seller? Gulfport doesn’t say, but we do have a thought…
Read More “Gulfport Picks Up 12,600 Utica Acres in Monroe County, OH for $87M”
It’s certainly not THE highest, but it is certainly one of the highest fines we’ve seen assessed by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). Yesterday the DEP fined Rice Energy $3.5 million “for multiple violations of environmental laws at 10 well sites and 6 pipeline locations.” The violations, spanning “several years,” occurred at sites in Washington and Greene counties. Here’s the details…
Chesapeake Energy is leveraged up to its neck with elaborate loans up loans and notes (IOUs) upon notes. We don’t know how they keep it all straight. Must take an entire department full of CPAs to track it all. No doubt the CPAs escaped CEO Doug Lawler’s ax when he was chopping 1,500 jobs from the company (see 
PDC Energy, a driller in the Wattenberg Field in Colorado and the Utica in Ohio, paused their Utica drilling program in 2015 (see 
Pipelines are the safest form of transportation on the planet–bar none. Everyone knows it. But anti-fossil fuel radicals attempt to lie about the safety of pipelines in an attempt to get projects canceled–a tactic in their war on fossil fuels. They know as well as anyone that pipelines are perfectly safe, so they lie about safety to try and stop projects. Like the $3.5 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline and the $5 billion Atlantic Coast Pipeline–both critically important projects in the Marcellus/Utica. Note their language in opposing such projects. The aim is not to re-route the projects, but to kill them altogether. There is no reasoning with un-reasonable people like those who are members of the Allegheny-Blue Ridge Alliance, a small group of anti-fossil fuel radicals…
For some time we’ve followed the story of Range Resources and their (former) wastewater impoundments in Washington County, PA. The PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) fined Range a whopping $4.15 million for violations in September 2014 (see 
Statoil, based in Norway, is a big player in the West Virginia Marcellus Shale. Statoil paid property taxes to Brooke, Marshall, Ohio and Wetzel counties (all in WV) in 2015 and later found, during an audit/review, that they had overpaid those counties. They overpaid Brooke by $1.8 million, Ohio by $2.9 million, Wetzel by $1.6 million and Marshall by $342,000. The WV Tax Department argues that Statoil “acted negligently” and exercised “poor judgment” in not finding the mistake sooner. All four counties voted to deny Statoil’s request, so Statoil took them to court, asking the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals to hear the case. However, the Appeals court has just ruled that the cases are not “complex” and don’t require “special treatment,” so back to county court the cases will go…
Stone Energy, an independent oil and natural gas exploration and production company (E&P) headquartered in Lafayette, Louisiana drills mainly in the Gulf of Mexico but also has a presence in the Marcellus/Utica Shale with 90,000 acres of leases. Last year Stone quit drilling in the northeast and actually shut-in part of their production due to low prices (see 
Ultra Petroleum, based in Houston, TX, is an independent exploration and production (E&P) company mainly focused on drilling in the Green River Basin of Wyoming. Ultra also drills for oil in the Uinta Basin/Three Rivers area in Utah. In addition, Ultra maintains a position in the Pennsylvania Marcellus shale with leases on 184,000 gross (91,000 net) acres–no small amount. They aren’t currently drilling on their Marcellus acreage, but if prices change, they likely would. At the end of April Ultra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (see 
In July MDN reported that the New York Stock Exchange de-listed trading for shares in Atlas Resource Partners (see 
Some of the first businesses that will profit from the mighty Shell ethane cracker being built in Beaver County, PA will be small, local businesses. Restaurants, banquet halls, hotels, drug stores, real estate…the list goes on. But even small businesses that want a piece of the Shell cracker plant action don’t automatically have smooth sailing. Trying to get Shell to promote a business to its workers is hard work. Businesses report talking to Shell and being told that the company won’t help them by promoting them to cracker plant workers (a bit un-neighborly if you ask us). But that’s the life of an entrepreneur. You encounter brick wall after brick wall and you find a way to go through it, or over it, or around it, or under it. That’s what several small businesses in Beaver County are doing with Shell…
It’s about time! A U.S. District Court Judge in Texas recently granted Exxon the right to examine “internal phone records, other communications and depositions” of far-left Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, related to her involvement in attempting to persecute Exxon Mobil for daring to say man-made global warming may not be all it’s cracked up to be (see 
A small Worthington (Franklin County), OH driller, Geopetro, has just purchased 37,000 acres, 27 working shale wells and 5 not-yet-hooked-up wells from Chesapeake Energy for an undisclosed amount of money. The wells are located in Columbiana County, OH and Beaver County, PA. All but one of the wells are Utica wells. One of the wells is drilled to the Upper Devonian layer (above the Marcellus). The purchase is a big deal for the small Geopetro. It converts what until now has been mostly a conventional (shallow, vertical only) drilling company into primarily an unconventional/shale company. Welcome to the shale industry!…
Earlier this week we ran the news that Canadian pipeline giant TransCanada’s plan to radically lower the cost to pipe natural gas from the western regions of Canada to the eastern part of the country, in an effort to undercut Marcellus/Utica gas from flooding into the region, failed (see