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Weekly Shale Drilling Permits for PA, OH, WV: Apr 5-9
Only Pennsylvania, of the three active Marcellus/Utica drilling states, issued new shale drilling permits last week. But PA’s permits were more than enough to make up for Ohio and West Virginia. PA issued 20 new permits in 7 different counties, scattered across the state (although most of the permits were issued in the dry gas northeastern part of the state).
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The data crunchers at the Pittsburgh Business Times have been sifting through the data for 2020 and have composed a list of the “
Range Resources issued its fourth-quarter and full-year 2020 update yesterday. Range was the very first driller to sink a Marcellus well, back in 2004. The company currently owns ~460,000 acres in the M-U, most of it in the “wet gas” region which produces higher-profit NGLs. Range made $38 million in net profit during 4Q20, but lost $712 million for the entire year. However, the yearly loss is better than 2019 when Range lost $1.7 billion (heading in the right direction).
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) is once again spinning an error by a major Marcellus driller, Range Resources, as some sort of evil plot to avoid and defraud the DEP. Due to a mistake by a former employee, Range misclassified 42 old conventional wells on acreage it owns and did not plug the wells in a timely (for DEP) fashion. The DEP has just clipped the company $294,000 for the mistake.
We’ve noticed a flurry of new “notes” (i.e. bonds) being offered by Marcellus/Utica companies. We call notes/bonds IOUs. Typically a company will issue new notes (a promise to pay in the future, with interest) in order to retire older notes coming due. Notes are a form of self-financing by using debt instead of issuing new shares of stock (diluting existing shares). M-U drillers Range Resources and Antero Resources both quickly sold out of their recent note offerings at higher prices than originally requested. According to S&P analysts, the Range and Antero fast sellout is proof that credit is loosening for drillers in the M-U and in other shale plays.
In a pair of announcements earlier this week, U.S. Well Services announced it has signed new long-term deals with both Range Resources and EQT to supply “electric fracking” services. We told you in February 2020 that Range had signed on with U.S. Well Services to continue using its electric fracking service (see 
The Marcellus/Utica is the #1 natural gas producing play in the country. Last month the M-U region produced 33.6 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d), according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s December Drilling Productivity Report (see 
As we entered 2020, the stock price for most Marcellus/Utica drillers was near or even at the lowest it had ever been (see