Eclipse NatGas Production Up 23% in 2016, Big Utica’s Coming 2017
In early February, Eclipse Resources, a Marcellus/Utica pure play driller headquartered in State College, PA that drills mostly in Ohio, released an operational update for fourth quarter and all of 2016 (see Eclipse Resources 2016 & 4Q16 Update – Super Laterals Coming). Yesterday the company released a full update, including financials, for full year and fourth quarter 2016. The report shows natural gas production was up significantly in 2016, up 23% from 2015. However, natural gas liquids (NGL) production was flat and oil production, a small part of the company’s production, was down. On the financial side, Eclipse lost $204 million in 2016, which is a vast improvement over their $971 million loss in 2015. Things are turning around. During 2017, Eclipse plans to drill 24 wells with an average lateral length of approximately 13,300 feet. Eleven of those 24 will be “Super-Laterals” with lateral extensions exceeding 15,000 feet. Mammoth! You may recall Eclipse has drilled what is (so far) the longest Utica well ever, the Purple Hayes, some 18,500 feet long (see Eclipse Res. 1Q16: Drills Longest Shale Well Ever! “Purple Hayes”). Can you imagine another dozen of them?! Buckle up, here comes 2017 for Eclipse…
Read More “Eclipse NatGas Production Up 23% in 2016, Big Utica’s Coming 2017”
A “boost” from the oil and gas industry, specifically the Utica industry, is beginning to “trickle” through Muskingum County once again, says the director of the Zanesville-Muskingum County Port Authority. No, we’re not talking about drilling Utica wells–not in Muskingum, anyway. What we are talking about are companies that work in the industry. Oilfield services companies like Halliburton and Producers Service Corporation are, once again, expanding their businesses and adding new jobs. Muskingum is located next to four of the best counties in which to drill a Utica well–Guernsey, Belmont, Noble and Monroe. Belmont has the bonus of being the likely location of the next ethane cracker to commit to the region–PTT Global Chemical’s cracker plant. With an uptick in Utica drilling, and activity around the coming cracker plant, Muskingum County is in the catbird seat for economic expansion…
Companies in the oil and gas space, in particular midstream (pipeline) companies, have complicated ownership structures on paper. There are usually a number of subsidiary companies. Sometimes these companies have a “mother ship” which is owned by stockholders, and a subsidiary that is a master limited partnership (MLP), which is a different kind of corporate structure. MLPs don’t have shares of stock but instead issue units (about the same thing as shares of stock). MLPs give the unitholders certain tax advantages not offered to stockholders. Yes, its complicated. The important thing to know is that often these large pipeline companies have layers within layers. Which is the setup for this story. TransCanada, which purchased Columbia Pipeline Group last year for $10 billion (see 
In January MDN told you about an effort in Virginia to ensure new changes in Virginia’s environmental regulations that require “mandatory disclosure of fracking chemicals, baseline water testing and monitoring, and spill prevention and response planning” would still protect trade secrets–the exact combinations of chemicals used by drillers when fracking (see 
In May 2015, Obama’s rogue Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), along with the Obama U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), released a finalized rule clarifying what “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) means vis-à-vis what can be regulated under the federal Clean Water Act (see 
Less than two weeks ago Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt was confirmed to be the new Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (see 
On Friday, Feb. 3, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) gave a final approval for Energy Transfer’s Rover Pipeline project–a $3.7 billion, 711-mile Marcellus/Utica natural gas pipeline that will run from PA, WV and eastern OH through OH into Michigan and eventually into Canada (see 
New York State is a hopeless, corrupt mess. MDN previously reported on a $900 million natural gas-fired electric generating plant coming to Orange County, NY (see 
PDC Energy, a driller in the Wattenberg Field in Colorado and the Utica in Ohio, paused their Utica drilling program in 2015 (see 
The Allegheny Institute exists to conduct research, education and advocacy work in a mission to defend taxpayers and businesses against burdensome taxation, inefficiency and intrusiveness of an ever expanding government. That’s a pretty tall order because government–at all levels–is always expanding, like a voracious monster. Think of the Allegheny Institute as a mini version of the Heritage Foundation–focused on Pennsylvania. Last week the Institute published a new policy brief dealing with the latest severance tax proposal by PA Gov. Tom Wolf. This is a think piece–but not overly heavy. It is quite readable (within a few minutes) and delivers food for thought. As the author points out, you can change to a severance tax from an impact fee (i.e. tax), but will you really reap all of the revenue claimed? Politicians like Wolf often gloss over the economics. Currently, the impact fee is levied on drillers. A severance tax, if enacted, would (in many/most cases) be deducted as an expense from royalty checks, placing the burden for the tax on landowners–and lowering their income, which means less in the way of state income tax revenues. The severance tax proposed by Wolf, when considered honestly, is nothing short of a disaster…
A fake report recently issued by the anti-drilling, radically left and biased Public Herald (populated with activists masquerading as “journalists”) claims that some 9,400 residents in Pennsylvania have filed complaints that fracking has caused them ill-health in one way or the other. It is, according to anti-drillers, a public health “crisis.” How do we know this so-called report is TOTAL BS? Look at who wrote it, and look at who funded it: community organizers wrote it, the Heinz Foundation funded it. This is another sterling example of Joseph Goebbels-like propaganda. The Harrisburg Patriot-News allowed one such community organizer/anti-fossil fueler to run an article on the opinion-editorial page touting the report as legitimate. You can fool some of the people some of the time…
You may recall that in April 2016, New York’s anti-drilling governor, Andrew Cuomo, decided he would cave to pressure from radical environmentalists once again and block the building of the federally-approved Constitution Pipeline (see 
Cabot Oil & Gas is one of the premier drillers in the Marcellus Shale. They drill in a single Pennsylvania county–Susquehanna County. They consistently have 15 of the top 20 producing shale wells in PA. By our back-of-the-envelope estimation, Cabot, all by itself, drilling in one county, delivers something like 3% of all the natural gas produced in the entire country! It is an amazing story. What’s even more amazing is the big heart the company has. Woven into the Cabot DNA is giving back to the communities where they drill. It would take several posts to recount all of Cabot’s largess. We’ll mention just two cases. In 2012 Cabot donated $2 million and helped raise another $2.2 million (for a total of $4.2 million) to help build a new physicians clinic/hospital in Montrose, PA (see 
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: Lawyer who helped Vorys start Pittsburgh office joins Steptoe & Johnson; propane tanks for schools questioned with natural gas nearby; Chesapeake Energy: Follow the yellow brick road; Chesapeake Energy: It’s going to be daunting; The oil and gas situation as of February 2017; and U.S. oil exports hit record levels.