EXCO Resources Taps Out Remaining Line of Credit, Borrows $88M
EXCO Resources was once a sizable player in the Marcellus. They still have 184,000 net acres in the Marcellus, with 124 horizontal Marcellus wells drilled and in production. However the company, as we pointed out a year ago, has abandoned the Marcellus/Utica at this point (see EXCO: No Marcellus Drilling in 2015/2016, NYSE Threatens Delisting). The company flirted with bankruptcy for some time. In the end, they effectively turned over control of the company to its creditors (see EXCO Issues 2.7M Shares of New Stock in Lieu of Paying $23M). However, the company continues to struggle. Just last month they were threatened, for a third time, with having the company’s stock delisted from the New York Stock Exchange (see EXCO Resources Receives 3rd NYSE Notice of Delisting). EXCO has a line of credit (i.e. a “Revolving Credit Facility”) of $150 million. They’ve just borrowed the last $88 million of that total, to keep the company going…
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In a pair of announcements made this morning, major Marcellus/Utica driller Southwestern Energy said they are floating $1.15 billion of new IOUs (i.e. “notes”) that are unsecured and due to be repaid in 2026 and 2027. Part of the money will be used to pay off a 2015 loan for $327 million. It appears another part will be used to pay off up to $800 million of notes (a buyback or repurchase of the notes) due in 2020, 2022, and 2025. That is, Southwestern is swapping one form of debt for another. We’ve often observed this behavior in the energy industry–issuing new debt to pay off old debt. Bit of a shell game in our book, but then we’re not high finance people. Apparently this is not an unusual circumstance with large corporations, and nothing to be alarmed about…
Last week the rumor mill was hot with speculation that on Friday the Delaware River Basin Commission would release a draft document outlining their proposal to ban hydraulic fracturing in the Delaware River Basin permanently (see 
Events related (or of interest) to the Marcellus and Utica Shale, primarily pro-drilling events.
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: OH Utica natgas helps lead the shale revolution; what are Cabot’s key strategies for 2017/2018; NY natgas producers sent pack in shift to ‘clean energy’; weekend rally against Mariner East 2 doesn’t amount to much; ethane storage hub location could come down to politics; Yale’s fracking investments; US shale producers a great place to invest; recent court ruling may impede new gas pipelines; Senate picks up the pace on confirming more Trump energy nominees; the connection between Sierra Club and Russian money; and more!
It was just yesterday that MDN highlighted a story written by friend Tom Shepstone on his Natural Gas Now website theorizing that the Delaware River Basin Commission, long influenced by big money coming from the Haas family via the William Penn Foundation and their surrogates, is planning to implement a full ban on fracking in the Delaware River Basin (see Tom’s story: 
Eureka Midstream, which was once called Eureka Hunter (a subsidiary of Magnum Hunter Resources) has popped back up on the radar screen. Eureka, which operates exclusively in the Marcellus/Utica with ~200 miles of local gathering pipelines, announced yesterday it has expanded its line of credit from $225 million to $400 million, with an “accordion” option to further expand it to $500 million. Last time we wrote about Eureka (in December 2015), parent Magnum Hunter was looking to sell it off (see 
TransCanada’s WP XPress pipeline project has just scored an important permit from the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service that allows the project to move forward in the Monongahela National Forest. In Jan. 2016, Columbia Pipeline Group (now owned by TransCanada) filed a full, official application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for approval of the $850 million WB XPress Project (see 
We’ve written plenty about Philadelphia-area RINO (Republican In Name Only) State Rep. Gene DiGirolamo. In May DiGirolamo introduced yet another severance tax bill (see 
Radicals from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) say they will stage massive protests at several Virginia Department of Environmental Quality offices next week to protest against two Marcellus/Utica pipeline projects: the $5 billion Atlantic Coast Pipeline and $3.5 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline. Both projects have large segments crossing Virginia. CCAN says up to 1,000 people (mostly brainwashed college kids) will turn up to behave badly at DEQ office sites–using sit-ins, “prayer circles” (although Whom they pray to is unspecified) and sidewalk “rallies.” The DEQ is getting ready for the miscreants. The aim of the protests is to convince the DEQ to deny water crossing permits for the two pipeline projects. The DEQ has decided to let the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers handle the stream crossing evaluation, which doesn’t sit well with the radicals. They’re demanding the DEQ reassert authority in issuing the permits. Of course, the only outcome the radicals will accept is if the DEQ decides NOT to issue the permits. Is mob rule coming to the Old Dominion?…
In July MDN told you that puppets of the PA-based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) have once again gotten enough signatures to put a so-called Community Bill of Rights (i.e. frack ban) ballot measure on the ballot this November in Youngstown, Ohio–for the 7th time (see 
In our daily trawl of the news, we came across the text of a resolution by Pennsylvania State Senator Stewart J. Greenleaf. Sen. Greenleaf is looking for co-sponsors of the resolution, which urges PA natural gas producers to export natural gas to European countries in order to curtail a Russian natgas monopoly. Greenleaf said, “Copies of this resolution will be transmitted to the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, the President of the United States, the presiding officers of each house of Congress and to each member of Congress from Pennsylvania.” We thought: Nice sentiment…raise the natgas flag…rah rah and all that jazz. But at the end of the day, a resolution is meaningless. It has no force of law. It does nothing. It’s purely public relations bupkis. We wondered, why would Sen. Greenleaf, from Montgomery County (near Philadelphia) introduce this now? We revisited the list of traitorous Republican Senators who voted for the state budget that includes a severance tax (see 
Dominion Energy and Duke Energy hopes lightening will strike twice. In August, DTE Energy and Spectra Energy (now part of Enbridge), sent a letter to the new FERC quorum urging fast action to approve NEXUS Pipeline, a $2 billion, 255-mile interstate pipeline that will run from Ohio through Michigan and eventually to the Dawn Hub in Ontario, Canada (see 
In June 2016 MDN told you about a sham “study” on the way from an anti-drilling “researcher” from Yale University, funded by Big Green groups (see 
Phase 1A of the Rover Pipeline has been online for less than a week (see