Crestwood Midstream 3Q15: Marcellus/Utica Pipeline Volumes Drop
The Houston, TX-based Crestwood Midstream, which these days calls itself Crestwood Equity Partners, operates midstream businesses in multiple shale resource plays across the United States. Crestwood is engaged in the gathering, processing, treating, compression, storage and transportation of natural gas; storage, transportation, terminalling, and marketing of NGLs; and gathering, storage, terminalling and marketing of crude oil. Whew. Lots of different things! Yesterday Crestwood issued its third quarter 2015 financial and operational update. We’ve snipped out just those brief sections that touch on the Marcellus/Utica region, below. Among the news you’ll be interested in: The gathering pipelines operated by Crestwood in the southwest saw lower volumes in 3Q15 than in 3Q14, a result of low prices for natural gas and drillers deciding to shut-in some of their production. Crestwood continues to believe Antero Resources will soon complete 22 wells that will hit the Crestwood system sometime in 2016. And in the northeast part of the play, Crestwood expects to complete an expansion of the MARC I pipeline, connecting to the mighty Transco, “in the coming weeks.” Meanwhile, system volumes in the northeast are also down year over year…
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Yesterday Dominion, a huge utility/pipeline company operating in 13 states and organized into multiple corporations, released their third quarter 2015 update. Frankly, the official press release was pretty boring and short–concentrating on the financials. Our chief interest is on the operations side–tell us about the projects under way. So we went trolling through a transcript of yesterday’s investors conference call and sure enough, came up with gold. Tom Farrell, CEO of Dominion, had quite a bit to say in his prepared remarks about the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, the Cove Point LNG export plant, and even about “farmouts” of Utica acreage. Farrell said that surveying is 85% complete for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and engineering is 75% complete with some contracts for pipe already awarded. Farrell said that overall, the Cove Point project is now 47% done and there are 1,300 workers on site now. Exciting! But what’s this business about farmouts?…
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If you hold MarkWest Energy “units” (similar to shares of stock), it’s time to vote on the merger/takeover of MarkWest by Marathon Petroleum. In July, MarkWest (arguably the premier midstream company in the Marcellus/Utica), and Marathon (the fourth largest refiner in the U.S., headquartered in Ohio) announced a $20 billion deal for Marathon to buy out MarkWest (see 
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Way back in May 2014 MDN told you that UGI Energy Services, a subsidiary of UGI (a utility company in northeast PA) would build two new pipelines in northeast PA for $80 million that will allow them to transport cheap, abundant, locally extracted natural gas from Cabot Oil & Gas in Susquehanna County to residents in the greater Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area (see 
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THE Delaware Riverkeeper is running a scam on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). By all accounts it is a legal scam–but a scam nonetheless. FERC has a process known as a 
Patterson-UTI Energy is an oilfield services company, running in the same circles as Schlumberger, Halliburton and Baker Hughes. We previously reported the hammering oilfield services companies have been getting in the market. Not only are energy companies drilling less (laying rigs down), energy companies are pressuring oilfield services companies–the companies that do the actual drilling and fracking–to lower their prices. Less work and lower money for the work you’re doing has taken it’s toll. However, these companies are handling the downturn in different ways. Patterson-UTI, like several of its competitors, lost money in 3Q15–but Patterson’s loss cut much deeper (and makes us wonder if it’s ripe for a takeover). Let us explain…