Chesapeake Energy CFO Says Co. Will Mostly Ignore Utica in 2017

Chesapeake Energy’s Chief Financial Officer, Domenic Dell’Osso, filled in for his boss CEO Doug “the ax” Lawler by addressing analysts at the Barclays 2016 Global CEO Energy-Power Conference held earlier this week in New York City. Dom, you may recall, was one of Aubrey McClendon’s closest allies at Chesapeake, someone who had no problem standing by while McClendon was unceremoniously fired from the company he founded by corporate raiders in 2013 (see McClendon Exits Chesapeake, Well-Bonused “Friends” Replace Him). Dell’Osso remains in his post to this day. He drew the short straw to take a short vacation in NYC and talk about Chesapeake at the Barclays event. Although Dom’s talk focused on how rosy the picture is for Chesapeake now that they’ve fired thousands and sold nearly everything but the kitchen sink, it was his off-hand comment about the Utica Shale that caught our attention. Chesapeake is the #1 driller and producer in the Ohio Utica Shale, having drilled 588 wells in 2015 and producing an average of 847 million cubic feet per day equivalent of natural gas (see Which 5 Drillers Dominate in the Utica Shale?). What did Dom say about the Utica in 2017?…
Read More “Chesapeake Energy CFO Says Co. Will Mostly Ignore Utica in 2017”

For the past few days MDN has chronicled what we’ve named a royalties civil war happening between Pennsylvania landowners and the Marcellus drilling industry in the state–two groups usually on the same side. The war revolves around royalty checks–and how meager they are (see 
Two months ago when Baker Hughes released their venerable rig count numbers, we cracked a smile that things are beginning to turn around with an increase in U.S. rig counts (see
David Hill is a geologist and a driller located in Ohio (David R. Hill Inc.). At a recent Coffee and Commerce meeting sponsored by the Cambridge Area Chamber of Commerce, Hill offered his insights into when oil drilling may return to Guernsey County and eastern Ohio. As MDN recently reported, much of the focus on drilling in the Utica has lately turned to dry gas, or methane only (see
CONSOL Energy, which was once upon a time a coal company, is thanking its lucky stars it transitioned to being a mostly-natural gas drilling company instead. Yesterday the company’s stock hit a 52-week high. The reason? Because of CONSOL’s Marcellus/Utica drilling program. In a Zacks analyst note (below), we get an update on the aggressive moves CONSOL has been making in leasing new acreage. The company has now amassed 436,000 acres in the Marcellus and a whopping 622,000 acres in the Utica Shale. Here’s that update…
PDC Energy, a driller in the Wattenberg Field in Colorado and the Utica in Ohio, paused their Utica drilling program in 2015 (see
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: Cuomo’s legacy: Upstate NY’s death rattle; Ohio rigs steady at 17; PA unaffected by Williams consolidation; what, exactly, IS a cracker?; Total takes full control of Barnett Shale in TX; Apache hits 3B barrel oil find in TX; US methanol projects in trouble from falling gas prices; Canada faces “worst year on record” for oil drilling; and more!
Yesterday MDN reported the story that Dominion Transmission has decided to lock out union members from working at their jobs in Dominion installations over a contract dispute (see
In April 2015 Kinder Morgan’s Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP) subsidiary filed an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to build 8.2 miles of new looping pipeline in Tioga County, PA and beef up two compressor stations in Bradford County, PA. The $142 million project is called the Susquehanna West Project. The project will increase capacity along a section of the TGP, bumping it up by 145 million cubic feet per day (Mmcf/d). All of the extra capacity is spoken for by Statoil and the wells they’ve drilled in NEPA. Good news: On Tuesday FERC issued their approval for the project, which means construction will begin in January 2017…
Over the years, MarkWest Energy, now a part of MPLX, has built a number of natural gas processing plants in Wetzel County, WV, collectively called the Mobley plant. In September 2014 MarkWest signed a contract with paving and construction company J.F. Allen to design and build a retaining wall so MarkWest could then build the Mobley V plant (in Smithfield). MarkWest says, in a lawsuit they’ve filed against J.F. Allen and other subcontractors, that they didn’t do the job right and it resulted in long delays and millions of dollars in extra costs for MarkWest. Which MarkWest is now trying to recover, requesting a jury trial…
Virulent anti-fossil fuel nutters who are opposed to Spectra Energy’s $2 billion, 255-mile NEXUS interstate pipeline that will run from Ohio through Michigan and eventually to the Dawn Hub in Ontario, Canada, have stayed up late at night reading through all of the comments sent to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The habit of antis is to generate a blizzard of negative comments to FERC on any given project, sometimes using the names of their children (see
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 (
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