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Reunited: EQT Closes on Deal to Buy Equitrans Midstream for $5.4B
In November 2018, under intense pressure from activist investors, EQT split itself into two companies: EQT Corporation and Equitrans Midstream (see It’s Here! EQT Midstream Division Now Split into Standalone Co.). Equitrans became a new, completely separate company with its own board of directors and its own set of investors. Five-and-a-half years later (in March of this year), EQT dropped the bombshell announcement that it had cut a deal to buy back Equitrans in an all-stock deal worth $5.4 billion (see Stop Press! EQT Buying Equitrans Midstream in All-Stock Deal). The deal is now done. The two companies were reunited and became a single company yesterday.
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Last November, Tellurian, a company founded by Charif Souki, filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission warning investors that its financial situation raised “substantial doubt” that the company could continue as a going concern (see 
Incorporated in 1988, Environmental Service Laboratories, Inc. (ESL) is an environmental testing laboratory based in Indiana, PA, providing various analytical testing, consulting, and field sampling services. ESL customers include Marcellus/Utica natural gas drilling companies, industrial facilities, municipalities, engineering firms, local/state/federal government, and the general public. ESL is accredited to test drinking water, wastewater, soil, solid materials, natural gas, frozen dairy products, and meat. ESL has just sold itself for an undisclosed amount to Pace Analytical Services, based in Minneapolis, MN.
Diversified Energy (formerly Diversified Gas & Oil), with major assets in the Marcellus/Utica region (with assets in other regions, too), owns approximately 8 million acres of leases with 67,000 (mostly) conventional oil and gas wells. The company’s business model is to buy lower-producing wells on the cheap and find ways to make them more productive. Last September, Diversified’s CEO Rusty Huston, in an interview with Forbes, signaled that he would be looking to buy more assets outside of the Marcellus/Utica — specifically along the Gulf Coast (see 
In April, EQT Corporation and Equinor (formerly known as Statoil) announced a deal to swap land in Pennsylvania and Ohio (see 
Antero Midstream, a separate company from Antero Resources (at least on paper, although it is managed by the same people), issued a press release yesterday to announce it had purchased a bolt-on acquisition of gathering and compression assets in the Marcellus Shale for $70 million from Summit Midstream Partners. The assets acquired include two compressor stations and 48 miles of high-pressure gas-gathering pipelines located in West Virginia.
UGI, a diversified energy company with midstream (pipeline) operations in the Marcellus and one of PA’s largest utility companies, hinted last summer that it was looking to sell or spin off its propane subsidiary into a new company (see 
We tried to cram the gist of the news into the headline but found we could not. This is a big story, for multiple reasons. Most news outlets are reporting (and this is not incorrect) that EQT pulled off a big deal to divest a good chunk of its nonoperated assets (acreage and functioning wells in which EQT owns a minority stake) in northeastern Pennsylvania, trading those assets for 10,000 operated acres in Lycoming County, PA (in northeastern PA), plus 26,000 operated acres in Monroe County, OH, plus receiving $500 million cash, in a deal with Norway’s Equinor (formerly Statoil). EQT divesting from its nonop assets is a big deal. However, the bigger news, in our humble opinion, is that Equinor has (with this deal) completely exited all operated assets in U.S. shale. The company wants to keep its fingers in the U.S. shale pie, but only as a nonop operator — that is, investing in wells that other companies drill and maintain.
Here’s a story that caught our attention. Empire Energy, which drills for oil and gas in Australia’s Beetaloo/McArthur basin, owns producing oil and gas assets in New York State and Pennsylvania, which cover more than 270,000 net acres. Empire’s U.S. assets have output totaling some 4.5 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of gas plus small amounts of associated liquids from approximately 2,400 conventional wells. Empire is selling their U.S. assets for $9.1 million to a privately owned conventional producer — PPP Future Development. The intriguing part of this story is that Empire also owns drilling rights in the Marcellus and Utica shale layers underlying the conventional wells in New York State.
This is precisely what companies going through a merger DON’T want to happen. Last Thursday, both Chesapeake Energy and Southwestern Energy, which previously announced a deal to combine back in January (see