Halliburton/Baker Hughes Hold a Pre-Merger Garage Sale
Halliburton and Baker Hughes are having a pre-merger garage sale. In order for Halliburton to buy Baker Hughes, a deal worth $34.6 billion (see Shotgun Wedding: Halliburton Forces Baker Hughes to Sell), regulators are requiring both companies to shed more of their divisions and subsidiaries. Halliburton’s expandable liner hangers business is on the table. So too is Baker Hughes’ “core completions business,” which includes: packers, flow control tools, subsurface safety systems, intelligent well systems, permanent monitoring, sand control tools and sand control screens. And there’s more on the table, marked down for a quick sale. Because of the additional businesses that must be sold, the wedding/merger date for the two companies may get pushed back to early 2016. Halliburton and BH hope some of their competitors will stop by and pick something up at the pre-merger garage sale…
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Low energy Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush (as Donald Trump calls him) has decided to inject some high energy (as in the energy industry) into his campaign. Jeb is today visiting the Pittsburgh headquarters of one of the Marcellus/Utica’s most successful drillers–Rice Energy–to unveil his energy plan that calls for the lifting of the crude oil export ban (something our Dear Leader, President Obama, opposes) and for the approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline (Obama also opposes). However, the thing that makes Jeb’s visit to Rice Energy salient and meaningful for the Marcellus/Utica is that he will call for (a) lifting restrictions on exporting natural gas–making it easier to export natgas to Japan, China and European countries, and (b) fight Obama’s Clean Power Plan (CPP). There is no doubt Bush will say all of the right words and espouse policies the oil and gas industry can strongly support. The question is, will he actually do any of it if he gets elected?…
On January 9, 2014, a Freedom Industries facility next to the Elk River leaked ~10,000 gallons of crude 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol (MCHM) used in coal mining into the river, which is a tributary to the Kanawha River that runs through Charleston, WV. The results of that leak were dramatic. Some 300,000 residents from nine counties in the Charleston metropolitan area were without access to potable water for five days. Several Freedom Industries officials are now in jail and the company went bankrupt because of that single accident. Contrast coverage of that accident with another accident–caused by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at the Gold King Mine in Colorado. EPA personnel were fiddling around “testing” at a gold mine wastewater storage impoundment and accidentally unplugged it, dumping 3 million gallons of some of the nastiest wastewater you can imagine–with lead, arsenic and other heavy metals–into the Animas River north of Silverton, CO (see 
The Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will be in Pittsburgh tomorrow to conduct a hearing into how they can illegally regulate oil and gas drilling through the back door of so-called “fugitive” methane emissions, which they claim are insanely high in shale plays like the Marcellus/Utica (
Party time! Yesterday PennEast Pipeline filed their full, official application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for permission to commence building their $1 billion, 118-mile, 36-inch diameter pipeline that will deliver approximately 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day from the Marcellus gas fields of northeastern PA to locations in southeastern PA and across the border to Trenton, NJ. The long-term benefits to the pipeline are many–lower natural gas and electricity costs for millions of consumers. In addition, during construction the pipeline will generate an estimated $1.6 billion of economic impact during design and construction alone, supporting approximately 12,160 jobs and an associated $740 million in wages. This is good news for all Pennsylvanians and New Jerseyites. Of course anti-fossil fuel nutters also issued an angry press release claiming the PennEast Pipeline will do “irreparable harm” if built…
The PennFuture Secretary of the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection, John Quigley, continues to promote a hard-left agenda inside a once-great agency. Any time a Democrat like Quigley pairs the word “justice” with another word, like “environmental”, you know it’s a bad idea. Quigley is promoting the concept of creating an “office of environmental justice” within the DEP. What does that even mean? Is Quigley implying we currently have environmental “injustice” running rampant through the Commonwealth? Quigley also wants to use revenue raised from an obscenely high severance tax on Marcellus Shale drilling to fund more DEP inspectors to hang out at drill pads. Must be Quigley didn’t get the memo from Wolf that ALL of the severance tax money, if Wolf is lucky enough to get such a tax passed (very much in doubt), has already been promised in a quid pro quo agreement to teachers’ unions that helped get him elected…
This is disappointing. For over a year utility and electric generating giant NRG had planned to convert a coal-fired electric generating plan in Avon Lake (Lorain County), OH to burn Utica Shale gas instead. NRG’s plan includes building a $40 million, 20-mile pipeline to feed the Avon plant. That pipeline was finally approved in June (see 
Halliburton, the second largest oilfield services company in the world and a major presence in northeast drilling, performed a self audit of their 80,000+ employees and found that just over 1,000 (1.4%) of their employees were eligible for overtime but didn’t receive it. Some of those workers are in Pennsylvania Marcellus–39 of them in fact, who are owed a collective $800,000 in back wages. Halliburton turned themselves in to the U.S. Dept. of Labor, admitting the mistake and offering to make it right. The company reached an agreement with the DOL to pay $18,293,557 to 1,016 employees nationwide for uncompensated overtime, one of the biggest such cases “in recent years” according to the DOL…
Industrial Energy Consumers of America (IECA) is a trade organization representing some of the largest manufacturing companies on the planet–manufacturing plants that buy a lot of natural gas. The IECA is picking a fight with interstate pipeline companies by claiming the pipelines, which are quasi public utilities, are overcharging for the delivery of gas flowing through them. The IECA wants the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to step in and conduct rigorous reviews of the rates being charged…
MDN’s favorite U.S. Senator, bar none, is Jim Inhofe from Oklahoma. Sen. Inhofe is Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works–a very powerful voice in Washington, D.C. when it comes to the environment. We spotted a column written by Sen. Inhofe that rips apart President Obama’s so-called Clean Power Plan. In no uncertain words, Inhofe explains why the CPP–which is fully supported by America’s most liberal governor, PA Gov. Tom Wolf, and his lieutenant DEP Sec. John Quigley–is bad for the oil and gas industry, bad for the electric generating industry, and bad for all Americans. It is, in fact, a fraud being perpetrated on the American public to disguise Obama’s war on fossil fuels…
MarkWest Energy has been fined $76,405 by the West Virginia Dept. of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) for a series of water quality violations in connection with projects they’ve built in West Virginia from 2013 to this year. In addition to the fine, MarkWest is required to submit a plan to correct problems that still exist. This isn’t the first time MarkWest has been to the WVDEP wood shed. In 2013 they were fined $306,000 for polluting a small stream near their new Mobley processing plant in Wetzel County (see 
In April 2014, MDN told you about a proposal from Clean Energy Future to build an $800 million electric generation plant in Lordstown (Trumbull County), OH. The plant will be fired by natural gas from the Utica and Marcellus (see 
Dominion’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) faces some stiff opposition from the anti-drilling, landed gentry class, along with opposition from the usual anti-fossil fuel nutters and even opposition from Obama-controlled agencies including the BLM, FWS and USFS (see our