Crestwood Equity/Crestwood Midstream Complete Merger
Exactly one month ago MDN told you that Crestwood Equity Partners LP and Crestwood Midstream Partners (with operations in the northeast)–two different companies on paper–would merge (see Crestwood Equity/Midstream Announce Date to Merge Two Companies). Crestwood Equity Partners is a master limited partnership (MLP) that operates an NGL supply and logistics business and previously owned, on paper, 4% of Crestwood Midstream Partners, a pipeline business operating in multiple U.S. shale plays. Crestwood Midstream also had an NGL business. The two said they would complete a merger of the separate companies by yesterday, Sept. 30–and by golly, they did…
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The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: OH frack tax on time after all; EQT’s Andrew Place confirmed to join PA Public Utility Commission; listen to some of Jeb’s high-energy energy speech; WVU gets $100K to study pipeline safety; NH residents opposed to NED pipeline; gas in New England is in short supply; how shale has changed the world; China lowers shale drilling costs 23%; shale drilling on both sides of the pond; and more!
Just when you thought it was safe, Chesapeake Energy CEO Doug “the ax” Lawler has done it again. Two years ago Lawler swung the ax and fired 800 employees in a single day (see 
The Rogersville Shale once again popped up on the radar. Yesterday at the West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association (WVONGA) Conference in Wheeling, WV, a research geologist with the Kentucky Geological Survey talked about the Rogersville Shale, outlining its geography in both WV and KY. Corky Demarco, executive director of WVONGA chimed in with a reminder that Cabot Oil & Gas has drilled a test well in the WV Rogersville in Putnam County (see 
The ideologically rigid, most-liberal governor in America (according to InsideGov), Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, yesterday vetoed a stopgap spending budget passed by the Republican-controlled House and Senate, further damaging the people he pretends to want to help–little children in schools. Falling back on the same old lies and political pandering rhetoric, Wolf said he was vetoing the bill because it “sells out the people of Pennsylvania to oil and gas companies and Harrisburg special interests.” It’s now open war on the Marcellus industry by the Wolf administration. In his veto letter, Wolf doesn’t mention that his own special interests–primarily teachers’ unions–are the real reason he’s holding out for an obscenely high severance tax on Marcellus Shale production. Sometimes politicians like Wolf have conveniently leaky memories. Wolf is perfectly happy with driving the state right over an economic cliff if he doesn’t get his way on a severance tax, no matter who (i.e., children) get hurt…
Looking like he’d had his morning Ensure drink, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush had plenty of energy as he talked about energy policy in a speech he delivered yesterday at the headquarters of Rice Energy in Washington County, PA. As predicted, Bush said things the oil and gas industry can stand up and cheer for: lift the ban on exporting crude oil, make it easier to export natural gas, and repeal some of the onerous regulations now on the books. He would also roll back Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan regulations that target coal (and natural gas) with a regulatory death sentence. Below is how it was reported, followed by Bush’s policy paper on how he would handle energy policy if he were to get out of single digits in the polls and get the nomination (something not very likely)…
Some 35 anti-fossil fuel wackos, apparently with no jobs, show up during a slow news day at the Statehouse in Trenton, NJ to protest the PennEast Pipeline and news outlets report it as a major story, implying there’s a huge movement against the pipeline. What about the 366,500+ residents who also live in Mercer County and who aren’t opposed to the PennEast and who didn’t turn out to protest it? Is that worth a story? Apparently not. Of course this tiny protest wasn’t spontaneous–it was organized, planned, hyped and paid for by nutty Sierra Clubbers and THE Delaware Riverkeeper (Maya van Rossum)…
Your beliefs matter. For example, if you believe in the fairy tale of man-made global warming (see 
It’s heartbreaking, but not surprising, to see residents in a North Carolina make the same mistakes made by residents in New York State. Monday night the Stokes County (NC) Board of Commissioners voted to enact a three-year moratorium on potential shale drilling in the county. Well-meaning but completely ignorant residents agitated and cajoled the commissioners into voting for no drilling. Stokes, located in northern NC, is part of the Dan River sub-basin, which in turn is part of the larger Triassic Basin. Earlier this year the state cleared the way for fracking to begin (see 
Just last week MDN told you about the bone-headed proposal from a partisan group in West Virginia calling for a doubling or tripling of the severance tax on natural gas liquids–unless those NGLs stay in the state (see 
Investment research service Morningstar is out with their latest “Quarter-End Insights” on energy. The highly regarded service says (a) the price of crude oil won’t rebound anytime soon, and their long-term price projection is for oil to be priced around $64/barrel here in the U.S., (b) even though natural gas production is slowing in the U.S., there’s plenty more ready to go online and therefore prices will remain low for a while–they project a “midcycle” price for natural gas of $4/Mcf; and (c) one of their top three picks for stocks in the energy space is Marcellus driller Cabot Oil & Gas…
In the end, Williams decided that the takeover/merger proposal from Energy Transfer Equities (ETE) wasn’t so indecent after all. In June, ETE’s billionaire CEO Kelsy Warren revealed he had been propositioning Williams for over six months–offering Williams $64 per share to buy the company, totaling $48 billion (see 
Halliburton and Baker Hughes are having a pre-merger garage sale. In order for Halliburton to buy Baker Hughes, a deal worth $34.6 billion (see 
Our intrepid tipster is back with another juicy rumor about Chief Oil & Gas. You may recall that MDN broke the story Chief is closing its main Appalachian office near Pittsburgh, a tip later confirmed by Chief (see