Midstream Bombshell: MarkWest Sells Itself to Marathon Petroleum
While all eyes have been on the possible hostile takeover of midstream giant Williams by another midstream giant, Energy Transfer Equity (see Williams Continues to Resist ET Offer, Talks with Other Suitors), another midstream (i.e. pipeline company) merger was quietly being arranged that has rocked the midstream world. Yesterday MarkWest Energy, with major operations in the Marcellus/Utica–MDN would call it the premier midstream company in the northeast–announced it is selling itself to Marathon Petroleum Corp.’s midstream division MPLX, a master limited partnership or MLP. The “merger” (i.e. sale of MarkWest to Marathon) will create the fourth largest MLP in the United States–worth $21 billion in market capitalization. MarkWest is twice the size of MPLX, which makes this an interesting story and truly big news for the Marcellus/Utica…
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Whatever happened to the shotgun wedding between Halliburton and Baker Hughes–two of the largest oilfield services companies in the United States? After all, the boards for both companies approved the “blissful union” back in March (see 
MDN invites you to join us in attending RBN Energy’s “State of the Energy Markets” one-day event in New York City on July 23. Before you hurry to say “yes,” a few caveats. It costs money (a lot of it). It’s aimed at executives working in the industry, as well as traders and investors. If that describes you (and we know that many of you read MDN), you may be interested in attending. We guarantee it will be a great event. Rusty Braziel & company will provide an overview of the key issues facing natural gas, NGLs and the crude oil market. They will explain how the markets for those three commodities interact and affect each other. They will also take a look at prices, where they may be heading, and how infrastructure affects price. If you are really “into energy” as we are, this is a must attend event. Details are below, along with a link to register…
Although headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia), Penn Virginia Corporation is an oil and gas driller (i.e. “producer”, i.e., E&P company) with only a small presence in the Marcellus Shale: 21,700 net acres with no drilled wells. They concentrate on oil drilling the Texas Eagle Ford Shale play. MDN told you in March that Democrat billionaire corporate raider George Soros, one of the most vile big money investors in the world who has repeatedly damaged not only corporations but entire country’s economies, had taken a 9.1% ownership position in Penn Virginia in order to force it to sell and was doing exactly that (see 
Sunday evening MDN spotted what has to be THE biggest midstream story of 2015: Somebody wants to buy out and take over Williams Companies. The biggest midstream story of 2014 was the buyout of Access Midstream (the former Chesapeake Midstream) by Williams, creating a company that is nearly the size and certainly a worthy rival of the country’s biggest pipeline company Kinder Morgan (see 
It’s an LNG love story. Yesterday Shell announced they are buying BG Group, the former British Gas, for $69.7 billion dollars. To put it in perspective, in 1998 Exxon bought Mobil for $80 billion, forming what is now ExxonMobil. So this is that kind of scale–really really huge. The oil and gas industry is buzzing about the deal. Is this the first of many such consolidations, given the low price of oil? Will the Shell/BG deal impact shale drilling? What does it ultimately mean? We’ll leave it to others to discuss the broader implications. What we always wonder is, how will this affect the Marcellus/Utica? We have a few thoughts. Both Shell and BG have acreage in the Marcellus/Utica. But before we get to that, the first thing to understand about the Shell/BG deal is that it’s about LNG. This merger will make Shell the largest player in the global LNG market–easily twice the size of the nearest competitor…