4 Marcellus Drillers Ramp Up Production in 2016
We can’t say enough good things about Rusty Braziel and RBN Energy. Rusty was the co-founder of Bentek Energy, sold a few years ago to Platts. Rusty is the consummate industry professional who has forgotten more about the oil and gas industry than most of us will ever know. He recently wrote and published The Domino Effect: How the Shale Revolution is Transforming Energy Markets, Industries and Economies (buy it on Amazon). Rusty has collected a group of very smart industry analysts who write about the oil and gas industry. One of those analysts is Nick Cacchione, who wrote a post on the RBN Energy website yesterday about the top 10 gas-focused drillers in the country. It’s no coincidence that all of them have operations in the Marcellus/Utica, and most of them are totally focused on the northeast. We found it to be an enlightening and helpful article. One of the main points is how four of the top 10, while reducing their spending, have significantly increased their production numbers for 2016. Here’s a deep dive into the top 10 according to RBN, featuring the four who are “stepping on the gas”…
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There is a new development in the case of an illegal ban on injection wells passed by Highland Township in Elk County, PA. In 2013 the radical leftist PA-based group Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) convinced ignoramuses in Highland Township to pass a so-called Community Bill of Rights. Seneca Resources, a driller with leases and an active drilling program in Elk, had planned to drill an injection well on their own property to dispose of their own flowback and produced water. The CELDF-inspired ordinance Highland Twp prevented it, and Seneca threatened to sue the town (see 
Last week MDN reported on National Fuel Gas Company’s quarterly recently-filed quarterly report (see 
National Fuel Gas Company covers the full span of the oil and gas business–from upstream (with its wholly-owned drilling subsidiary Seneca Resources), to the midstream (with wholly-owned subsidiary Empire Pipeline) to downstream (NFG’s natural gas utility service to 740,000 customers in NY and PA). Big company. Diverse operations. Yesterday NFG issued what they call their third quarter update (everyone else’s second quarter update), covering April through June. According to NFG’s CEO Ronald Tanski, Seneca’s Marcellus production grew by an impressive 25% year over year, due to increased takeaway capacity on NFG’s pipelines and on improved gas prices in Appalachia. NFG’s pipeline business is doing very well–making more this year than last. The one part of the business that (surprisingly) lost money was the utility business. Here’s the full run-down for NFG and its various divisions…
National Fuel Gas (NFG), the Buffalo-based utility giant with both a drilling subsidiary (Seneca Resources) and a midstream/pipeline subsidiary (Empire Pipeline) filed an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in March 2015 for a pipeline project they call Northern Access 2016 (later renamed to simply Northern Access Project, dropping the “2016” part). The $455 million project 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 (see 
Last Friday MDN brought you the news about a professor who devised a clever formula for evaluating the overall environmental impact of 20 Marcellus drillers (see 
Yesterday National Fuel Gas Company, the utility giant headquartered in Buffalo, NY and parent of Marcellus driller Seneca Resources, announced that Seneca has partnered up with energy investor IOG Capital to essentially fund Seneca’s Marcellus drilling program in Elk, McKean and Cameron counties in north-central Pennsylvania. The outlines of the deal are thus: IOG will provide the cash and Seneca will do the drilling on up to 80 Marcellus wells on 10,500 acres in the Clermont/Rich Valley area of PA. IOG will get an 80% working interest in the wells. In addition to drilling the wells, National Fuel’s midstream subsidiary will connect the wells and get the gas to market. What this deal means is that Marcellus drilling activity in the Clermont/Rich Valley area will pick up over the few years. Here’s the details of this somewhat complicated deal…