WV Supreme Court Rules Against Antero in Well Tax Valuation Case
In a court case that stretches back to 2019, Antero Resources, the biggest driller in West Virginia, challenged how its wells had been valued for tax purposes in Doddridge and Richie counties for 2016 and 2017. Antero said the combined value of its wells for those years should have been $1.488 billion. The state tax commissioner reckoned the value to be $1.513 billion. The controversy of well valuations not only for Antero but other drillers led to a reworking of how the state law values shale wells (see WV Supreme Court Tweaks Shale Well Property Tax Calculation). That whole process is still playing out with a newly passed bill (see Bill to Fix WV NatGas Property Tax Rule Close – Will Gov Sign?). However, there’s still the outstanding issue of valuations back in 2016/2017 to resolve. Last week the WV Supreme Court resolved it…
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Spire STL is a 65-mile pipeline that connects to and flows Marcellus/Utica gas from the Rockies Express (REX) pipeline to residents and businesses in the St. Louis, MO area. The pipeline began flowing gas in late 2019 (see 
It appears the venerable number crunchers at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) bungled the monthly estimates they forecast quite badly in March, making a revision to the numbers for both the Marcellus/Utica and all seven tracked shale plays in yesterday’s April monthly Drilling Productivity Report. Last month EIA forecasted the M-U would produce 36.848 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) of natural gas in April (see 
The Enverus rig count, as of last Wednesday, stood at 791, even with the same number from the week before. We are still near the highest number of rigs in operation since March 2020, the dawn of the pandemic. We are only 47 rigs away from the pre-pandemic high of 838 rigs. Last week the Marcellus had 41 rigs operating (same as the prior week), while the Utica operated 11 rigs (dropping two rigs), for a total of 52 active rigs in the M-U. Our chief rival, the Louisiana and Texas Haynesville, operated 69 rigs last week, dropping three rigs from the week before.
GAI Consultants, headquartered in Pittsburgh, is a planning, engineering & environmental consulting firm serving clients in the energy, transportation, development, government, and industrial markets. GAI has been in business since 1958 and has served the oil and gas industry since the early 1980s. The shale industry was a big boom for GAI’s business. Shale is helping GAI to grow again–exponentially. GAI announced last Friday the company has expanded further into the oil and gas industry with the acquisition of PGH Petroleum & Environmental Engineers LLC, headquartered in Austin, Texas.
Despots and dictators the world over are the same, whether it’s Vladimir Putin relabeling his naked aggression of outright war against Ukraine a “military operation,” or New York State’s so-called Climate Action Council relabeling natural gas as “fossil gas.” Tyrants seek to relabel those things they can’t control in an attempt to pressure, hoodwink, and manipulate the masses–to force others into doing what they (the tyrants) want done. The Communists who run NY state can’t convince the population to self-immolate by giving up the use of natural gas, so they’re changing the language, hoping to convince more people to go along with their harebrained plan to dump the use of all “fossil fuels.” The left’s plan is energy suicide and a majority of New Yorkers instinctively know it.
Yesterday the “front month” price of natural gas trading on the NYMEX Henry Hub closed at $7/MMBtu, the highest NYMEX price in 13.5 years (since Nov. 10, 2008). It was just two days we told you the NYMEX price was making a run for $7, closing at $6.64 on Monday (see 
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat, has (for months) forcefully pushed the issue of completing the 94% done-and-in-the-ground Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) project, a 303-mile pipeline from WV into Virginia. In early March Manchin let all five Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) commissioners know of his displeasure that MVP, along with other pipeline projects, is delayed (see 
MDN has highlighted Capstone Turbine Corporation, a California company that manufactures small electric-generating plants that run on natural gas, several times in the past (
A story out of Port St. Joe, Florida, involving LNG, caught our attention for a couple of reasons. Nopetro LNG plans to construct and operate as many as three liquefaction trains that will liquefy up to 3.86 billion cubic feet per year of natural gas for export and delivery to markets in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. That’s 3.86 Bcf for an entire year, not per day. Modern facilities that export LNG from the Gulf Coast, like Sabine Pass, export close to 4 Bcf per day. The facility proposed by Nopetro is minuscule in comparison. It will receive natural gas from St. Joe Natural Gas Company Inc. Nopetro recently asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to declare that it (FERC) does not have jurisdiction and regulation over such a tiny facility. FERC agreed!
Although a number of publicly-traded oil and natural gas companies have gone along with so-called ESG (environmental, social, and governance) programs and have pledged to reduce their so-called carbon footprint by X percentage by Y date, apparently O&G companies are not genuflecting far enough or fast enough for Big Green Nazis like Bloomberg. The latest laughable tactic we’ve noticed is that Bloomberg has taken to carbon-shaming, you know, like fat-shaming–the use of ridicule and bullying as a pressure tactic to imply a person isn’t “enough” because of their weight (or race, or economic status, or carbon emanations). Leftists like Bloomberg “News” are so predictable–they always fall into the same tired routines. Are oil and gas companies not dancing to your tune? Use the blowtorch pulpit you have (a news service) to try and shame them into doing it. We say to Bloomberg, blow your carbon-shaming out your (ahem) Bloomberg Terminal…