Williams Reorganizes to Focus on NatGas and “Drive Value”
Williams continues to tread water as it is under assault by corporate raiders who want to toss out Williams management, fire a bunch a people and sell the company. We’ve chronicled the chaos endlessly (see our Williams stories here). It seems like every day there’s something new in this soap opera. Here’s the latest: Williams announced yesterday the company is streamlining its operations by consolidating what is currently five business units into three units: (1) Atlantic-Gulf, (2) West and (3) Northeast Gathering & Processing. The stated purpose is to “advance a natural gas-focused strategy” and to “drive value.” Here’s the details…
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For some time now we’ve been tracking progress with an LNG export plant planned for the eastern shore of Nova Scotia, the Bear Head LNG project. Of all the Canadian LNG export projects that will export Marcellus gas, Bear Head seems to have the most momentum. The project has received most (if not all) of the necessary permits it needs to proceed. The most recent regulatory hurdle was a greenhouse gas approval from Nova Scotia, issued in July (see 
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: Former PGT Trucking building sold to Shell in Beaver County; Apache strikes it big in Texas Permian; Freeport LNG wants more export capacity; o&g industry still improving according to the Fed; and more!
Residents in Wilmot Township (Bradford County), PA are mad as hell over shorted royalty checks–and they aren’t taking it anymore. Yesterday Wilmot Township’s three supervisors passed a resolution demanding, “production be discontinued from wells where landowners are having their royalty checks diminished to nothing or nearly nothing.” That is, they want to block natural gas production from existing shale wells drilled in a town smack in the middle of one of the most-drilled places in Pennsylvania. We’ve long chronicled the fight between landowners and some (certainly not all) drillers who are screwing them out of royalty payments by claiming inflated post-production costs. The issue first came to prominence with claims by landowners signed with Chesapeake Energy, who claimed Chessy had cut a sweetheart deal with its former midstream company (Access Midstream) whereby Access bumped up its charges for piping gas which Chesapeake claimed as an expense and deducted from royalty checks, and then Access turned around and invested big money into the old mothership company (see 
A labor union contract between Dominion Transmission Inc. (DTI) and Local 69 of the Utility Workers Union of America, United Gas Workers expired on April 1st. Since that time the two have come to the bargaining table many times, without success. So Dominion is now trying to bust up the union (our words) by locking out 915 union workers from their jobs across the northeast and mid-Atlantic: in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Maryland and Virginia. Dominion’s top brass says they’ve had to take this step because of the upcoming heating season, about ready to begin. Dominion is concerned that customers not be left out in the cold, literally–so they’re replacing union workers with management workers and temps “trained to handle essential tasks.” Dominion is a large company that not only is an LDC (a local utility that distributes gas to customers), but also a big midstream pipeline company. Here’s what we wonder but haven’t seen addressed: What about Dominion’s Cove Point LNG export plant? Are any of these sidelined union workers off the job at Cove Point, and will that delay the project? Same for the upcoming Atlantic Coast Pipeline project. When it gets built, will it get built without union workers? What about Dominion compressor station upgrades coming to six plants, recently approved by FERC (see 
Antero Resources, one of the biggest drillers in the Marcellus, released their second quarter 2016 update in August (see 
As we do every month, MDN tracks how many rigs oilfield services company Patterson-UTI Energy reports operating–as a proxy for when/if the drop in rig counts for the Marcellus/Utica will turn around. Patterson operates a number of rigs in the northeast, as well as other areas of the continental United States (and Canada). Month by month Paterson’s rig count has declined over the past year plus–until June (see 
We scored a copy of a refreshingly honest (blunt) assessment of the Marcellus industry in Pennsylvania. The letter was written by the Marcellus Shale Coalition’s vice president of government affairs, James Welty. It’s dated August 29 and was written and sent to all Pennsylvania legislators in both the House and Senate. The legislators have been enjoying themselves on summer holiday break and are now returning to work, with just a couple of weeks left in the legislative session. The PA House is in session for 2 1/2 more weeks and the Senate for 1 1/2 weeks (final day is Nov. 15 for each). There’s not much time left to handle the people’s business in 2016. Welty’s letter to the legislators is a frank assessment of the current down market faced by PA’s shale drillers. Welty tells lawmakers that recently adopted Article 78a rules will mean drillers spend an additional $2 million per well to drill–a budget buster for many drillers. He also says PA has the highest effective tax rate on drilling in the country at 12.3%. Although PA doesn’t call it a severance tax, it essentially is a severance tax and costs more than any other oil and gas state, contrary to the lies by Democrats who lust for more money to give away. Give this frank assessment of our beloved industry a read–it’s worth your time to see how the industry characterizes the current landscape in PA…
In the past we’ve been pretty critical of the Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office (IFO). It claims to provide revenue projections for use in the state budget process along with “impartial and timely analysis of fiscal, economic and budgetary issues to assist Commonwealth residents and the General Assembly in their evaluation of policy decisions.” It’s been our observation the IFO is populated with partisan Democrats. However, we have to acknowledge lately their analysis work, at least with regard to the Marcellus industry, has been pretty accurate (see 
This story is almost too good to be true. Researchers from Ohio State University have been analyzing the genomes of microorganisms (i.e. bacteria) that live in Utica Shale wells. (Who would think to do something like that?) The researchers “have found evidence of sustainable ecosystems taking hold there–populated in part by a never-before-seen genus of bacteria they have dubbed ‘Frackibacter.'” Translation: There’s little communities of microscopic critters that live in those shale wells, including a brand new critter that lives only in fracked Utica Shale wells. The hypothesis is that fracking itself created this new mutated life form. The researchers are calling it Frackibacter (we think it’s pronounced frack-uh-back-tor). We have a better name: Frackenstein! Yes ladies and gentlemen, step right up to witness this fracking freak of nature–a bacteria created from fracking itself. Who knew fracking didn’t destroy life, but actually creates it?! Below is an article about the discovery, along with a copy of the peer reviewed paper published in the journal Nature Microbiology announcing the discovery of this new fracked life form…
This is an update to a story MDN ran last week observing that Utica drillers have slowed (or stopped) their wet gas drilling work and instead have shifted to drilling Utica wells, in Ohio, in the dry gas areas (see 