Stock Price for M-U Drillers Continues to Go Up as Gas Price Climbs
Analysts at S&P Global Platts continue to track the performance of some of the country’s biggest shale gas drillers (most of them located in the Marcellus/Utica). S&P tracks production, spending, and the performance of their stock price. The price of natural gas has gone up over the past three months and along with it, the stock price for most (not all) shale gas drillers. For example, the share price for Range Resources has soared, gaining 42% in value over the last 90 days.
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Two of three Marcellus/Utica states received permits to drill new shale wells last week. Pennsylvania issued 13 new permits, almost all of them in the dry gas northeastern part of the state. Ohio issued 11 new permits, in the center of the Utica play. West Virginia’s shale industry got skunked last week–no new permits. It’s been quite a while since that’s happened in WV.
RBN Energy is a fountain of great information about the oil and gas sector. Headed by industry icon Rusty Braziel, RBN tracks and reports on a number of O&G companies. One of the best features of their information service is tracking the performance of three groups of publicly-traded O&G companies: Oil-Weighted E&Ps, Diversified E&Ps, and Gas-Weighted E&Ps. That last group, the gas-focused companies, is a list of 10 E&Ps. Only two of the ten don’t have any operations in the Marcellus/Utica–all the rest do. RBN has just published a post about the financial performance in 1Q21 for all three groups. The numbers are very encouraging.
M&A, or mergers & acquisitions, is on everyone’s mind in the oil and gas industry. Particularly in the Marcellus/Utica region. EQT, under the leadership of Toby Rice, already the largest natural gas producer in the country, has been on the prowl. In the past eight months EQT has picked up all of Chevron’s M-U assets (see
Last Friday National Fuel Gas Company (NFG), the parent company for Seneca Resources and Empire Pipeline, issued its latest quarterly update for the quarter ending Mar. 31 (NFG’s second fiscal quarter, everyone else’s first quarter). The company’s purchase of Shell’s Marcellus assets last year (450,000 acres, 350 producing Marcellus and Utica shale wells in Tioga County) gave Seneca a 43% boost in production in its fiscal 2Q21 over 2Q20. Seneca drilled 14 new wells in fiscal 2Q.
One of the criticisms often leveled against the shale industry is that shale drillers have destroyed shareholder value (the price of company stock) over the past decade or so (see
Analysts with S&P Global Market Intelligence say that shale gas drillers in the Marcellus/Utica region have finally learned their lesson and are sticking to their promise to keep capital spending restrained this year–even with an increase in the price of gas. Both spending and rig counts are predicted to stay low this year as drillers work on boosting free cash flow and improving company share price.
The experts at RBN Energy have, for the past five years, closely tracked the spending and production of a representative collection of 39 major public E&P (exploration & production) companies. RBN splits the companies tracked into three groups: Oil-Weighted E&Ps, Diversified E&Ps, and Gas-Weighted E&Ps. In a recent post, RBN reveals what those 39 companies have announced they will spend, and produce, in 2021. For eight of the nine gas-weighted E&Ps that produce gas in the Marcellus/Utica, the numbers show drillers will spend 15% less this year, but overall will produce 2% more natural gas than they did last year.
The data crunchers at the Pittsburgh Business Times have been sifting through the data for 2020 and have composed a list of the “
Some good news to share on this Friday. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has given National Fuel Gas Company (NFG) the green light to begin construction on its FM100 pipeline project. The FM100 Project will beef up and extend an existing pipeline network in northwestern Pennsylvania to flow an extra 330 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of Marcellus gas to Williams’ mighty Transco Pipeline (see