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Baker Hughes Rig Counts for Sept Continue to Drop Across US & in NE
Oilfield service giant Baker Hughes released their venerable monthly rotary rig count report yesterday for September 2015. After posting gains in the overall land-based U.S. rig count number for two straight months in July and August, the September numbers dropped like a rock. September U.S. active land-based rigs averaged 848, down 35 from the average of 883 in August and down 18 from July’s average of 866. Rig counts for the Marcellus/Utica also continued to drop, showing another four rigs were idled during September across the combined PA/OH/WV. It’s getting bloody out there…
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On Tuesday a Medina County, OH judge ruled that the NEXUS pipeline does have a right to enter private land to survey it for possible routes for the pipeline. The judge said Ohio laws allow private companies to survey land for eventual appropriation (including eminent domain) as long as the company can prove it is an energy or utility company. The judge said the law is quite clear on that point–plain and simple to understand. The judge’s decision didn’t sit too well with the CORNballs of CORN (Coalition to Reroute Nexus pipeline). We’ve written plenty about CORN and their effort to “reroute” the NEXUS (
One of the arguments sometimes trotted out by anti-drillers is that heavy trucks lumbering up and down rural roads will destroy them. And indeed, sometimes it does–when the road is old or not constructed to handle heavy truck traffic. Typically drillers will repair the roads to better-than-new condition–we’ve seen it in some PA counties. But here’s something you don’t often hear: Gulfport Energy is about to spend $8 million on road repairs to roads BEFORE they use them, not after. The repairs will be done over the next six weeks in Belmont County, OH, and it delights Belmont County Commission members. Somebody else footing the bill for rebuilt roads will put a smile on any county commissioner’s face…
Carrizo Oil & Gas CEO S.P. “Chip” Johnson continues to sell off his personal shares of the company’s stock that he leads. On June 1, Johnson sold 24,661 shares of company stock for $1.2 million (see 
The Independent Petroleum Association of American (IPAA) held their San Francisco Oil and Gas Investment Symposium on Monday. Among the speakers was J. Russell Porter, president and CEO of Utica Shale driller Gastar Exploration. Porter gave his thoughts on the Marcellus/Utica, wet and dry gas, and what’s ahead for his company…
California company Capstone Turbine Corporation, on the left coast, continues to land new sales in the Marcellus/Utica region. We first told you about Capstone selling their microturbine energy systems in 2014 (see 
In September MDN told you that the 711-mile ET Rover Pipeline, costing an estimated $3.7 billion to build, had awarded a contract to an Ohio company to build 39 compressor stations (see 
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: 50 Bcf of natgas in 3 years; Marcellus/Utica could unleash up to 10 Bcf/d; millennials prep for o&g jobs; out-of-staters behind Youngstown frack ban measure; PA Supreme Court hears 2 natgas cases; Incredibly [Stupid] Hulk goes to Harrisburg to demand frack ban; hunting for natgas in north Georgia; ETE/Williams selling assets in Florida; oil prices heading higher; whatever happened to peak oil?; and more!
Once again PA Gov. Tom Wolf is proving himself to be a partisan hack, and certainly not up to the job the good people of Pennsylvania elected him to do. He’s a typical tax and spend liberal (voted the most liberal governor in America by the non-partisan InsideGov, see 
Shell is currently spending an undisclosed amount of money (millions of dollars) to build a bridge to a site they now own where they may one day build a $2-$3 billion ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, PA (see 
As a general rule, professional actors are some of the most clueless people on the planet. Mark Ruffalo, one of the most clueless of the clueless, was honored at a Pennsylvania college because of it. Ruffalo was honored by Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA (near Harrisburg) with the Sam Rose ’58 and Julie Walters Prize for his environmental cluelessism, er, a, activism. Hey, Ruffalo does a decent job with acting (we enjoy the Avengers movies)–we’ll grant him that. But have you ever noticed the lights are all on with Ruffalo–but nobody’s actually home? Anywho, the awarded Ruffalo, who calls himself “an accidental environmentalist,” will make a trip to Harrisburg today to deliver a letter from “100 organizations” and “25,000 concerned citizens” to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf. The letter will ask Wolf to immediately enact a fracking moratorium in the state. What…radical? No way that will ever happen? Pipe dream? You may have forgetten (but we didn’t) that the Pennsylvania State Democrat Party, before they nominated Wolf to be their leader, adopted an official plank in the party platform calling for the same identical thing (see 
Last week we told you how heartbreaking it is to see well-meaning (but ignorant) county officials in Stokes County, NC pass a three-year moratorium on fracking–repeating the same mistakes made in New York State (see 
For those of us who concentrate on the natural gas (and oil) industry, it’s sometimes easy to forget that CONSOL Energy, with major drilling operations in the Marcellus and Utica Shale, began life and is still one of the country’s largest coal companies. We’ve been telling you for years that the company is transitioning from being a coal company to being a natgas company (see 
FirstEnergy Corp., an electric utility operating in the Appalachian region, announced yesterday they will construct a new substation near Smithfield, WV along with a new two-mile transmission line–in order to send more electricity to a nearby natural gas processing plant. FirstEnergy is spending $63 million to build the new substation and transmission line. The announcement doesn’t name the owner of the natgas processing plant, but we have a guess…
Hybrid Tool Solutions has just sold itself to a venture capital firm by the name of Hastings Equity Partners for an undisclosed amount of money. Hybrid Tool, headquartered in Oklahoma, has major operations in the Marcellus/Utica. The company has a patent pending, unique process for conducting frac plug drill outs. What the heck is that? Along the horizontal section of an underground bore hole, plugs are inserted every so often in order to wall off a section of the pipe where fracking will be done. The plugs divide the pipe into sections so each section can be worked on separately–starting with the section furthest out (the “toe”). After all sections are fracked, a drill is put down the hole to drill out the frac plugs and release the gas to the wellhead, putting the well into production. It is that process of drilling out the frac plugs that Hybrid performs, having done over 800 wells in the Marcellus/Utica over the past two years. By selling themselves (essentially getting new funding), they plan to expand beyond the northeast into other shale plays…