Weekly Shale Drilling Permits for PA, OH, WV: Jan 4-8
Two of three M-U drilling states received permits last week. Pennsylvania scored 10 permits to drill new shale wells. Ohio received 2 permits for Utica wells. West Virginia received no new permits to drill new shale wells.
NOTE: This post was updated on 1/14/21. We previously reported a set of 6 wells in WV in error–those wells received permits in 2020 and not 2021. Sorry! Thank you to a sharp MDN reader who flagged it for us.
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Here’s a first! Pennsylvania has (so far) issued 36 permits for frack wastewater injection wells. Every single one of those wells is located in the western part of the state. A frack wastewater company headquartered in Susquehanna County, PA (in the northeastern part of the state) is “exploring the possibility” of building an injection well in (no lie) Dimock! We love it!
Epsilon Energy concentrates most of its effort on the Marcellus in Susquehanna County, PA. Epsilon doesn’t actually do any of its own drilling. The company partners with (gives money to) other companies, like Chesapeake Energy, and the other company does the drilling. Epsilon, according to its website, owns ~4,000 net acres in the PA Marcellus. They also own assets in Oklahoma’s Anadarko Basin. On Tuesday Epsilon issued its third-quarter 2020 update, showing a bump up in revenue to $5.8 million in 3Q20 (vs. $5.2 million in 3Q19).
Dan Dinges, CEO of Cabot Oil & Gas, said last week: “2020 has proven to be the most challenging year for natural gas prices in the last 25 years, resulting from a multi-year trend of overcapitalization of both oil and natural gas assets across our industry.” Indeed. The company released its third-quarter 2020 update on Friday and reported a net loss of $15 million, compared to net income of $90.4 million in 3Q19. This is the first quarterly net loss for Cabot in recent memory. Still, there was plenty of good news coming from the 3Q update…
Here we go again. Just last week we told you that a New York City law firm couldn’t find enough interest to make a class action lawsuit against Cabot Oil & Gas using a sham indictment from the highly political Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office, so the law firm pulled the plug on the case (see
Cabot Oil & Gas issued an operational update yesterday to announce that because of persistently low prices for natgas, as of Sept. 18 the company curtailed approximately 372 million cubic feet equivalent per day (MMcfe/d) of gross production to finish out the last 13 days of the quarter. After that?