West Virginia’s Top 10 Gas & Oil Producers, According to WVONGA
According to Anne Blankenship, executive director of the West Virginia Oil & Natural Gas Association (WVONGA), “We have only begun to scratch the surface of developing this enormous resource beneath us,” referring to shale oil and gas in the state. As part of a larger interview with WV media, Blankenship shared a list of the 10 biggest natural gas producers in the state, along with the top 10 biggest oil producers in the state. We always dig that kind of information and thought you would too.
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We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. Groups like the Sierra Club are jobs killers. When was the last time you heard about a Big Green group actually creating new jobs–except for paying a few protesters? They NEVER create jobs, they ALWAYS kill jobs via lawsuits. And so it is with lawsuits that have stopped work on the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) from West Virginia to North Carolina. Lawsuits launched by Big Green groups against ACP have resulted in thousands of people now out of work. Many of them worked for small companies.
Some 15 elected West Virginia officials met on Monday with the Route 2 | I-68 Authority. The aim of the meeting is to move the ball down the field (or the asphalt along the ground) in an effort to expand Route 2 to four lanes from Parkersburg, WV to Chester, WV, and to extend Interstate 68 from I-79 near Morgantown, WV westward to WV Route 2 along the Ohio River Valley, some 73 miles. The reason for the $1 billion project? To handle more shale-related traffic.
Natural gas was front and center at the ninth annual Marcellus and Manufacturing Development Conference, an event of the West Virginia Manufacturers Association, held yesterday in Morgantown, WV. Among the speakers was Steve Winberg, U.S. Department of Energy assistant secretary for fossil energy. He mouthed strong support for the Appalachian Basin ethane “hub” saying the region can easily support up to five ethane crackers, and that could lead to $35 billion of investment and 100,000 jobs in the region.
A high school student reporter recently turned in an excellent segment for PBS’ News Hour Weekend program about the job opportunities for young people working on pipelines in West Virginia. Among the bits this intrepid young reporter unearthed is something we told you about years ago: Some pipeline welders make salaries of $1,000+ PER DAY! Not a typo.
What happened? Just a few weeks ago MDN told you that the West Virginia legislature had passed a bill with bipartisan support (and support from both the drilling industry and surface owners) that would redirect monies from low-producing oil and gas wells to fund a program to plug old abandoned wells (see 
Diversified Gas & Oil has been on a mission to buy as many non-shale (conventional) oil and gas wells as it can in the Appalachian Basin. It owns close to 3 million acres of leases with some 60,000 (mostly) conventional oil and gas wells. That’s changing. Yesterday Diversified announced it has cut a deal to buy 107 operating (and 3 non-operating) shale wells in Pennsylvania and West Virginia for $400 million.
Yesterday IHS Markit released a study commissioned by Shale Crescent USA and JobsOhio that finds natural gas produced in the tri-state region of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia will be 45% of the nation’s production by 2040, up from 31% this year. This is truly big news with lots of ramifications.
Equitrans Midstream, which used to be called EQT Midstream, yesterday announced they have cut their first big deal since separating from EQT last year. Equitrans is buying a 60% stake in Eureka Midstream, a 190-mile pipeline system in Ohio and West Virginia serving both the Marcellus and Utica, and a 100% stake in the tiny 15-mile Hornet Midstream, a gathering system in WV that connects to Eureka.
Witch hunts take a loooong time when it’s the U.S. government doing the hunting. We told you back in 2015 that the U.S. Dept. of Labor was unfairly targeting the Marcellus industry, looking at every time slip, to see if they could bag companies violating federal overtime regulations–not paying their workers overtime (see 
A West Virginia Circuit Court case in September 2017, Crowder and Wentz v EQT, found in favor of surface landowners ruling that EQT did not have the right to extend underground shale wells to adjacent properties where EQT also owned the mineral rights (see 
West Virginia has the right idea. Their legislature meets for 60 days total at the beginning of each new year, and then they’re pretty much done for the year. Go to Charleston, work hard, then leave and go back to your day job. Part-time legislators. Love it! The 2019 session is now done and dusted. In the closing days of the session, two bills to help the oil and gas industry got passed and now wait for Gov. Jim Justice to sign them. However, one very important bill for the industry did not pass.
Our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, published a post yesterday on the topic of “U.S. natural gas processing plant capacity and throughput have increased in recent years.” In that post EIA links to a handy dandy online tool that lists all of the active natural gas processing plants operating in the U.S. We used the tool to download all of the plants in PA, OH and WV, and further trimmed out the low volume (conventional only) processing plants, leaving a list of sweet 16 Marcellus/Utica processing plants–where they are located and how much they process.
We spotted a write-up on a recent court decision coming from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in which a West Virginia landowner had a signed Marcellus lease requiring PetroEdge (later Statoil) to drill three wells on or under their property. And yet the courts have sided with the driller, essentially allowing the driller to wiggle out of the terms of the lease.
Thank God anti fossil fuelers are throwing in the towel in West Virginia–at least for this year–in their never-ending campaign to stop shale drilling in the state. A recent article appearing in the biased ProPublica and Charleston Gazette-Mail highlights antis’ frustration in not getting their bills to advance in this year’s legislative session–a session that is rapidly coming to a close.
Yesterday we told you that the West Virginia Surface Owners Rights Organization (SORO) is pushing a couple of bills to address the issue of abandoned and orphan wells (see