Stone Energy Appoints Special Liaison, Inches Toward Bankruptcy?
There’s no way to sugarcoat the fact that Stone Energy–an independent oil and natural gas exploration and production company (E&P) headquartered in Lafayette, Louisiana that drills mainly in the Gulf of Mexico but also has a presence in the Marcellus/Utica Shale with 75,000 acres of leases–is inching toward a bankruptcy filing. That’s our take anyway. Last week Stone issued an update for 1Q16 in which they disclose their line of credit with the banks has been reduced from $500 million to $300 million (see Stone Energy 1Q16: Most Marcellus Production Still Closed Down). That’s a big hairy problem, because there is now a “borrowing base deficiency” of $175.3 million–meaning the company may go into default on its loans. Stone outlined various repayment options last week, none of them good. So it was no surprise that yesterday Stone announced one of its board members is becoming a “Special Liaison” to management to help the company “with assessing strategic alternatives and restructuring alternatives.” The word “restructuring,” as we’ve seen with other producers, is a euphemism for bankruptcy…
Read More “Stone Energy Appoints Special Liaison, Inches Toward Bankruptcy?”
As MDN pointed out earlier this month, EXCO Resources, once a sizable player in the Marcellus–with 145,000 net acres in the Marcellus and having drilled and operating 124 horizontal Marcellus wells–has pretty much abandoned the Marcellus at this point (see 
Is this the smoking gun that proves collusion and corruption between Democrat New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and radical Big Green groups? In March, AG Schneiderman and a handful of other Democrat Attorneys General, along with climate huckster Al Gore, gathered in New York City to discuss a coordinated legal attack against oil and gas companies (see 
Big Green groups, including the nutty Sierra Club, the left-leaning Chesapeake Climate Action Network and the odious Earthjustice continue to pump money and lawyers and time into an effort to stop progress on Dominion’s construction of an LNG (liquefied natural gas) export facility in Cove Point, Maryland. As of March the Cove Point project was already a quarter done (see 
Before Kathleen Kane took office as Pennsylvania’s Attorney General, we warned you that she’s an anti-driller out for blood (see 
A recent meeting organized by the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), called a Congressional Call-Up, was truly eye opening. People attending the meeting were briefed on key federal issues impacting the oil and natural gas industry. Here’s the startling news: There are currently 44 separate actions by various executive branch (Obama) agencies targeting the o&g industry–meant to cripple it. It is breathtaking in scope. Those doing the briefing called it a “well-planned attack on virtually every aspect of oil and natural gas planning, production and use.” Depressingly, no one in Congress or the media seems to even notice–or if they do, they don’t care…
Talk about intellectual dishonesty and academic incest…The Rockefellar family, behind the latest initiatives to force investors to divest from so-called fossil fuel companies and funders of numerous wacko Big Green initiatives, along with former members of the radical PennFuture organization who now work for far-left PA. Gov. Tom Wolf (PA Secretary of Conservation and Natural Resource Cindy Dunn, and PA Secretary of the Dept. of Environment Protection John Quigley), funded and contributed to a new report from the Brookings Institution that calls on PA to adopt a severance tax. Brookings is a once-proud organization that has stooped to pimping itself out like a cheap whore to anyone with money. They have the nerve to call it a new “study”–like it’s somehow an academic pursuit, beyond questioning–when in fact it’s nothing more than propaganda meant to pressure PA into adopting a Marcellus-killing severance tax. There’s nothing scholarly about it…
This will not sit well with anti-fossil fuel eggheads in the elite halls of Ivy League institutions. One of their own, Dartmouth College, will confer an honorary doctorate in June on one of the oil and gas industry’s consummate insiders–Daniel Yergin. Yergin is vice chairman of consulting powerhouse IHS, and the author of the bestselling book “The Prize: the Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power,” for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Yergin’s most recent bestseller is “The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World.” The New York Times calls Yergin, “America’s most influential energy pundit.” He is unabashedly pro-oil and gas. And now he’s going to be honored at the Darmouth graduation ceremony where he will (even worse!) deliver the commencement address…
And then there were four. The Center for Sustainable Shale Development (CSSD) has fought stiff headwinds from the beginning. The organization was founded by a group of shale industry people and environmentalists reaching across the isle to forge strict standards that both sides can live with. Environmental leftists, like Mamma Teresa Heinz Kerry and her Heniz Endowments, pulled support and have actively worked against the CSSD (see 
As we have long chronicled, a few anti-drilling parents from the Mars School District (Butler County, far western part of the state), backed by a couple of Big Green groups from the other side of the state (THE Delaware Riverkeeper and the Clean Air Council, both based in the Philadelphia area), sued Middlesex Township to stop shale drilling in rural portions of the county. Rex Energy had applied for, was legally permitted for, but wasn’t allowed to drill a series of wells some three-fourths of a mile from the Mars School (for background, see our long list of “Martian” stories 
The Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), charged with overseeing the health and use of the Susquehanna River (nation’s 16th largest river), has just issued a new report that examines the activities of the Commission surrounding its management of water use by the natural gas industry from 2008-2013. The report, titled “Water Use Associated with Natural Gas Shale Development: An Assessment of Activities Managed by the Susquehanna River Basin Commission July 2008 through December 2013” (full copy below) concludes that Marcellus drilling has not strained water supplies in the Susquehanna River Basin. The SRBC, unlike the DRBC (Delaware River Basin Commission) has responsibly managed water resources in its region and has not interfered with shale drilling–but rather has worked with drillers to successfully manage water resources. The DRBC, on the other hand, has been paralyzed, both without and within the organization, into blocking shale drilling within its jurisdiction. Here’s a report from the functional SRBC (as opposed to the dysfunctional DRBC)–a quasi-governmental organization that knows what it’s doing…
Yesterday MDN told you the sad news that southwest PA hotel owners have hit a rough patch and some of them are putting their properties on the auction block (see 
Somehow this bit of news escaped us a few weeks ago–perhaps because most of the impacts will happen in Oklahoma. Williams, the midstream giant that is currently being half-heartedly pursued by Energy Transfer Equity in a buyout/merger, is preparing for the eventual merger by laying off 10% of its workforce. Williams says they layoffs are due to “current market forces” and not because of the impending merger. Sorry–we don’t buy it. We suspect the layoffs have a great deal to do with trimming down before the company is eventually sold. Williams employs 6,700 people in North America and in late March they began dumping 10% (~670) of them. Some 100 of those layoffs are happening in the company’s Tulsa, OK headquarters. The others will come from across the country–including here in the Marcellus/Utica region…
This Thursday the Pennsylvania Independent Regulatory Review Commission (IRRC) will take up the matter of approving recently proposed new drilling regulations from the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection. Conventional drillers in PA strong object to the new rules, Aricles 78 and 78a, and sued to stop the IRRC from reviewing them. They lost (see