SWEPI Puts 9,346 Acres of PA Marcellus Leases Up for Auction
From time to time exploration and production companies (aka “drillers” or “producers”) decide to sell leases for acreage they don’t plan to drill on or under. Typically when a new play is discovered there is a bit of a land rush as drillers begin leasing. In the Marcellus, a driller may decide to concentrate on a specific county in the state, as Cabot Oil & Gas did with Susquehanna County in northeastern PA. Cabot happened to hit the jackpot with some of the most productive gas wells on the planet. Other times, when the leasing is done and drilling has begun drillers begin to figure out where they want to spend their money. It takes a lot of money to drill a Marcellus well–on the order of $7 million. Eventually drillers find there are isolated tracts of acreage they’ve leased that don’t fit with their future plans, so they either horse trade and swap, or perhaps put the acreage leases up for public auction. Such is the case with Shell’s SWEPI subsidiary. They recently posted three largish tracts of leased acreage up for auction–two in Tioga County, PA and one in Potter County, PA. Here’s a description of the land SWEPI is trying to dump…
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The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has given a preliminary thumbs up to the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a $3.5 billion, 301-mile pipeline that will run from Wetzel County, WV to the Transco Pipeline in Pittsylvania County, VA. The project, which filed an official application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last October, is being built by EQT, NextEra Energy and several other partners (see 
This story is unbelievable on so many levels. A pointy-headed liberal who cloisters himself inside the insular Beltway of Washington, DC made a trip to Pittsburgh last week to talk to a small class of 70 students at Carnegie Mellon University. In this talk the lib proclaimed that the “incentives” provided by PA to Shell to lure a cracker plant to the state are, essentially, monies the state didn’t have to spend and a burden to the taxpayers of PA because Ohio and West Virginia may also reap some of the benefits of the cracker (without “paying” for it). The lib’s operating assumption is that 100% of everyone’s money belongs to the all-knowing government–including money made by big, evil corporations like Shell. He further states that by granting a few exemptions on taxes to Shell, PA is taking money out of the pockets of common folk. His philosophy and assumptions are so twisted it’s beyond belief. What’s more twisted is that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote a major story about the talk–as if it’s news…
Swiss-based company INEOS is a young but rapidly growing chemical company with roughly $40 billion in sales per year. INEOS’ competitors would be companies like BASF, Bayer and Dow Chemical. They have their fingers in a lot of pies. For example, the company currently has two ships that shuttle Marcellus and Utica Shale ethane from Philadelphia to Scotland and Norway (see 
In July 2014, Vantage Energy, a Colorado company with major operations in the Marcellus, announced they would launch an initial public offering (IPO) seeking $400. Then in September the number was revised up–the company felt like $601 million would be the goal of their IPO (see 
Higher prices for Rex Energy’s Marcellus/Utica gas are on the way. Why? Because the company will, beginning in November, begin to ship some of its gas out of the northeast–to the Midwest and Gulf Coast, where it can get higher prices. So says Rex in an update issued yesterday. Rex issued an operational update yesterday to discuss recent results and the next round of drilling they plan to do–4 more wells on the Vaughn pad in Carroll County, OH–and the news that a new high pressure gathering system is on the way in Butler County, PA. Included in the update is the good news that Rex will begin to ship 100 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of natgas to the Gulf Coast and 30 MMcf/d to the Midwest, starting in November, via two different pipelines. Which pipelines?…
Two Democrat-run anti-fossil fuel organizations–the Southern Environmental Law Center and Appalachian Mountain Advocates–pooled their donated money together and went out to find a consulting firm with the veneer of respectability that could be bought off to produce a faux “report” slamming two much-needed pipelines. They found an easy mark in Synapse Energy Economics, headquartered in ultra-liberal Massachusetts. The “report” Synapse produced says neither Dominion’s $5 billion, 594-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline (a natural gas pipeline that will stretch from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina), nor EQT’s $3.5 billion, 301-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (from Wetzel County, WV to the Transco Pipeline in Pittsylvania County, VA) are needed. The sham report, titled “Are the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Mountain Valley Pipeline Necessary?” (full copy below) is getting picked up by lazy (or propagandist) mainstream news organizations and reported as real news. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a joke…
Getting a pre-packaged bankruptcy today is like ordering a McDonalds Happy Meal–just order and drive up to the window and pick it up. Simple. In July Halcon Resources, a Utica Shale driller that “guessed wrong” by leasing 140,000 Utica Shale acres in the northern part of the play (in Ohio) and currently doesn’t drill on any of that acreage, filed for a pre-packaged bankruptcy (see 
Last Thursday Antero Midstream, the wholly-owned midstream subsidiary of powerhouse Marcellus/Utica driller Antero Resources, announced it is floating a round of “senior notes” (otherwise known as IOUs) to help the company pay off older debt. New debt for old debt. Not a game we enjoy playing, but Wall Streeters dig it. Antero Midstream first said they hoped to get $500 million for the notes, but later issued a second announcement “upsizing” the offering (like supersizing your fries at McDonalds) to $650 million. Such upsizing is typical (we’ve seen it dozens of times before). Here’s the announcements from Antero from last week…
CONSOL Energy, which was once upon a time a coal company, is thanking its lucky stars it transitioned to being a mostly-natural gas drilling company instead. Yesterday the company’s stock hit a 52-week high. The reason? Because of CONSOL’s Marcellus/Utica drilling program. In a Zacks analyst note (below), we get an update on the aggressive moves CONSOL has been making in leasing new acreage. The company has now amassed 436,000 acres in the Marcellus and a whopping 622,000 acres in the Utica Shale. Here’s that update…
PDC Energy, a driller in the Wattenberg Field in Colorado and the Utica in Ohio, paused their Utica drilling program in 2015 (see 
Yesterday MDN reported that Wilmot Township, located in one of the most-drilled counties in Pennsylvania (Bradford County) has taken the unusual step of demanding that drillers (in particular Chesapeake Energy) stop flowing natural gas from drilled wells unless/until they start paying landowners a minimum 12.5% royalty for the gas produced (see 
In April 2015 Kinder Morgan’s Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP) subsidiary filed an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to build 8.2 miles of new looping pipeline in Tioga County, PA and beef up two compressor stations in Bradford County, PA. The $142 million project is called the Susquehanna West Project. The project will increase capacity along a section of the TGP, bumping it up by 145 million cubic feet per day (Mmcf/d). All of the extra capacity is spoken for by Statoil and the wells they’ve drilled in NEPA. Good news: On Tuesday FERC issued their approval for the project, which means construction will begin in January 2017…
Residents in Wilmot Township (Bradford County), PA are mad as hell over shorted royalty checks–and they aren’t taking it anymore. Yesterday Wilmot Township’s three supervisors passed a resolution demanding, “production be discontinued from wells where landowners are having their royalty checks diminished to nothing or nearly nothing.” That is, they want to block natural gas production from existing shale wells drilled in a town smack in the middle of one of the most-drilled places in Pennsylvania. We’ve long chronicled the fight between landowners and some (certainly not all) drillers who are screwing them out of royalty payments by claiming inflated post-production costs. The issue first came to prominence with claims by landowners signed with Chesapeake Energy, who claimed Chessy had cut a sweetheart deal with its former midstream company (Access Midstream) whereby Access bumped up its charges for piping gas which Chesapeake claimed as an expense and deducted from royalty checks, and then Access turned around and invested big money into the old mothership company (see