Marcellus & Utica Shale Story Links: Tue, Jul 12, 2016
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: How long will Marcellus/Utica well backlog last?; MLPs started announcing projects again in June; how the Marcellus changed life in PA; $195M shortfall in WV severance tax for FY 2016; shale rigs hit bottom in 1H16; oilfield tech to keep an eye on; natgas prices had a tough week; Williams phase-out of MLP won’t be cheap; and more!
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This pipeline project has been, until now, completely off our radar screen. As pipeline projects go, it’s pretty small. But building even a single square inch of new pipeline, or expanding a compressor station, is anathema to anti-fossil fuel nutters. So we expect this project will be in the headlines starting this week, with a pair open house meetings in the Philadelphia area (and one in Delaware) where the project will get built. The project is being built by Eastern Shore Natural Gas and is called the 2017 System Expansion project. In March 2015, Eastern Shore ran a non-binding open season to see if customers want more natural gas in the Delmarva Peninsula area (includes most of Delaware and portions of Maryland and Virginia). It looks like Eastern Shore’s customers expressed enough interest that they plan to move forward with an expansion project that will bring new sources of natgas from an interconnection Eastern Shore has with the mighty TETCo (Texas Eastern Company) pipeline near Philadelphia. Below we have details on the expansion project, and details for the open house meetings scheduled for this week in PA and DE…
It’s not all doom and gloom in the Marcellus/Utica. Seems like for the best part of a year we’ve only heard about layoffs and companies filing for bankruptcy, due to the major slowdown in drilling in our neck of the woods. But that’s not an accurate picture. Take an old steel plant in the Wheeling, WV area that had been closed for 30 years. A new business now occupies the old Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corp. plant in Benwood, WV. JLE Industries has set up shop in the old plant with (so far) 25 full-time workers to inspect and repair metal tubes used in shale drilling. Chris Harris, the owner/operator, believes the company will continue to grow…
We’re starting to crack a smile of hope that drilling has once again picked up. Our first bit of evidence that the tide is turning came last week when we reported that Patterson-UTI Energy’s rig count had gone up by two in June (see 
In May MDN told you that EQT, a major Marcellus (and Utica) driller based in Pittsburgh, had cut a deal to purchase all of Norwegian Statoil’s Marcellus assets in West Virginia (see 
Are we finally, blessedly “done” with the ongoing soap opera that was the proposed takeover/merger of midstream giant Williams by fellow midstream giant Energy Transfer Equity? Can Williams now go back to its “considerable pile of knitting” (that pile meaning some 16 expansion projects)? Well, in a word, yes! Except….except if another suitor comes along who wants to buy Williams, which is a very real possibility. A couple of analysts mull over the possibilities now that the ETE plan to buy Williams is dead…
Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas is out with their Mid-Year Job Cut Report (full copy below). Overall, across all sectors, it seems that job cuts are slowing down–a good sign to be sure. But what about job cuts in the energy industry? The news there is mixed. While the pace of job cuts in the energy industry is slowing as the year progresses (a good sign), if you look at the raw numbers for the first six months of 2016 versus 2015, the news is not so good. For the first six months of 2015 the energy industry cut 60,500 jobs. For the same period in 2016, the number of jobs cut was 77,211, a 28% increase this year over last. Oy vey! Will the cuts never stop?…
Sunoco Logistics Partners, builder of the Mariner East pipeline projects and operator of the Marcus Hook refinery near Philadelphia (among many other projects) is floating more debt in order to pay off older debt. Last week Sunoco LP announced a new round of debt, or what we call IOUs, to the tune of $550 million. The sale will conclude tomorrow…
We have sad news to report. Late last week Corky DeMarco, the well-loved executive director of the West Virginia Oil & Natural Gas Association (WVONGA) died of an apparent heart attack. Corky was just 68 years old. Corky took up the leadership of WVONGA in November 2002 and guided (and grew) the organization through the turbulent shale years. Needless to say, he will be greatly missed…
Events related to drilling in the Marcellus and Utica Shale, primarily pro-drilling.
In May 2015 MDN brought you news of a then-newly released “study” from “scientists” at Oregon State University and the University of Cincinnati that reportedly found people living near fracking sites in Ohio were being exposed to “deadly” air pollution (see 
In May MDN told you about a sham lawsuit brought by two radical environmental groups–Homeowners Against Land Taking – PennEast Inc. (HALT PennEast) and the New Jersey Conservation Foundation–against the PennEast Pipeline (see 
It’s been some time since we’ve heard anything about/from the Ashtabula Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) plant project that Velocys says it will build in Ashtabula, Ohio. As a quick tutorial for those who may not know, GTL converts natural gas, a hydrocarbon, into other hydrocarbons, like diesel fuel, gasoline, solvents and (for Ashtabula) waxes. An abundance of cheap natural gas in the Marcellus/Utica is one of the prime motivators for establishing a GTL plant in the area. But although we’ve heard plenty of talk about such plants, none of them seem to get built–including the Ashtabula plant. There has been progress on the Ashtabula project. Early in 2015 Velocys filed for a permit, which was subsequently granted (see