NFG: More PA Fracked Gas to NY Coming Online Next Few Months

Late last week National Fuel Gas Company (NFG), the parent company of Marcellus/Utica driller Seneca Resources and midstream company Empire Pipeline, issued its third-quarter (everyone else’s second quarter) financial and operational update. Among the things we learned: Seneca dropped to using a single drilling rig in June and shut-in some of its Marcellus/Utica production. That strategy remains in place for the foreseeable future, according to NFG’s top brass.
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A word you will likely see a lot more of in quarterly updates by oil and gas drillers across the country is the word “impairment.” It’s an accounting term that means the value of an asset (leased acreage or wells) is adjusted, down, to reflect a company’s best guess as to how much revenue that asset can generate. We wrote about impairments back in 2015 (see 
Wow! What a difference three months can make. In January Moody’s Investors Service downgraded EQT Corporation’s bonds to “junk” status (see
A major announcement yesterday from both Shell and National Fuel Gas Company (NFG) says Shell has cut a deal to sell all of its remaining Appalachian assets, which includes 450,000 acres and some 350 producing M-U shale wells along with pipeline assets, to NFG for $541 million. The deal is expected to close by the end of July.
Late last week National Fuel Gas Company (NFG), the parent company of Marcellus/Utica driller Seneca Resources, issued its second-quarter (everyone else’s first quarter) financial and operational update. The company’s natural gas production increased 10.7 billion cubic feet (Bcf), up 24%, due primarily to production from new Marcellus and Utica wells completed and connected to sales. The production increase is all the more impressive because Seneca curtailed (shut-in) 2.7 Bcf of natural gas production during the quarter due to lower spot prices at sales points in Pennsylvania.
Late last week National Fuel Gas Company (NFG), the parent company of Marcellus/Utica driller Seneca Resources, issued its first quarter (everyone else’s fourth quarter) financial and operational update. NFG CEO and President Dave Bauer proclaimed, “Our team has done a great job cracking the code on our Utica development program” in Tioga County, PA. However, because of the ongoing pricemageddon with natgas prices in the basement, Seneca President John McGinnis said the company will drop to running a single rig for the balance of 2020.
For months MDN has brought you bits and pieces of news from individual drillers, detailing plans to cut back on spending for new drilling in the Marcellus/Utica in 2020. It’s not just happening in the M-U–it’s happening across the country. The experts at RBN Energy have a terrific new post that pulls information about major drillers scaling back into one place. They analyze spending by three different groups of drillers: oil-focused, diversified, and gas-focused drillers. In the third category, all but one of the gas-focused drillers have major operations in the M-U. The stats are sobering. As a collective group, M-U gas drillers have pledged to cut their 2020 budgets 25% from the already-lower spending that happened this year. Ouch.
National Fuel Gas Company (NFG), headquartered in Western New York (near Buffalo), is the only remaining fully integrated energy company left in the Marcellus/Utica region–maybe in the country. Meaning they are the only company that drills for the energy (oil and gas), pipelines the energy they discover to market (midstream), and is also the utility company that delivers the energy to end users. Big company. Important company. NFG’s drilling arm is called Seneca Resources, and their pipeline/midstream arm is Empire Pipeline. Last Friday NFG issued its quarterly (and full year) update. Both Seneca and Empire got talked about.
National Fuel Gas Company (NFG), the utility and midstream giant based in Buffalo, NY, remains committed to building it’s Northern Access Pipeline project, a $500 million project that includes building 97 miles of new pipeline along a power line corridor from northwestern Pennsylvania up to Erie County, NY. The project also calls for 3 miles of new pipeline further up, in Niagara County, along with a new compressor station in the Town of Pendleton. Although New York State (under the profoundly corrupt Andrew Cuomo) continues to try and block the project, NFG says they will build it–in the 2022-23 time frame.
Last week National Fuel Gas Company (NFG), headquartered in Western New York State (operates drilling subsidiary Seneca Resources and pipeline subsidiary Empire Pipeline), issued its quarterly update. The company says it plans to cut back on its natural gas drilling in central and western Pennsylvania next year from three rigs to two, but will increase investment and work on pipelines.
In March we told you about National Fuel Gas Company’s (NFG) FM100 Project in northwestern Pennsylvania that will beef up and extend an existing pipeline network to flow an extra 330 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of Marcellus gas to Williams’ mighty Transco Pipeline (see
“In our exploration and production business, even though we achieved our highest ever average daily production rate this past quarter, we were expecting more. It’s a slight disappointment that we modestly lowered the midpoint of our production guidance to the low end of the range that we established last August.” So said National Fuel Gas Company (NFG) CEO Ron Tanski in talking about NFG’s Seneca Resources shale drilling subsidiary on a conference call last Friday.