Hess Board Member Buys 7K Shares, Now Owns $3.2M in Hess Stock
We occasionally bring you news of when senior management or members of the board of directors for an upstream (drillers) or midstream (pipelines) company either buy or sell shares of stock in their own company. It’s called “insider trading.” There are good reasons to do both–buy or sell. But let’s be honest, if you see upper management/board members repeatedly selling their shares of stock, it just doesn’t look good (see Carrizo Oil & Gas “Insiders” Continue to Sell Company Stock). When you notice someone buying their own company’s stock, and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, it just kind of inspires confidence that, “Hey, if they believe in the company that strongly, maybe I should too.” Such is the case with a recent purchase by John H. Mullin III, a member of the board of directors at Hess, which drills in the Utica Shale. Mullin just bought 7,000 shares of Hess for $381,430. That brings Mullin’s total holdings of Hess stock to $3.2 million. One might say Director Mullin is “all in” when it comes to the company he helps direct…
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Below are upcoming events for the next three months (90 days). To see the full list of future events, visit this page: 
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. Part of today’s lineup: Baltimore wackos; OH educators; PA budget; RI electric rates; shale tech game changer.
We finally get to close the loop on a story we first brought you in 2013 (see 
For years MarkWest Energy has been one of the most active midstream companies in the Marcellus/Utica region. MDN has often called MarkWest the premier midstream company in the northeast–with more pipelines and processing plants than any other company, except possibly the recently merged Williams/Access Midstream. Even though MarkWest has a huge portfolio of assets in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, and continues to have a big and ambitious list of future projects, it wasn’t enough to stave off a takeover. Marathon Petroleum announced in July they are buying out MarkWest and adding it into their own operations (see 
On June 1 Carrizo Oil & Gas CEO Chip Johnson sold 24,661 shares of company stock for $1.2 million (see 
Pennsylvania Democrats are finally waking up and beginning to get nervous that state Republicans might actually not cave on a Marcellus-killing severance tax after all. How do we know? One of the Democrat public relations outlets–the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette–penned an “editorial” calling for a stopgap, short-term budget. PA’s Gov. Tom Wolf, who has been crowned the most liberal governor in America by the non-partisan website InsideGov (see 
In an attempt to make it easier for natural gas-fired electric generating plants to buy gas only when they actually need it, Kinder Morgan’s Tennessee Gas Pipeline has just launched a new service called PowerServe(TM). The new service is specifically targeted to electric plants in New England. Traditionally, electric generating plants have shied away from signing long-term contracts for natural gas because of the peaks and valleys in power generation. During the dead of winter, they need a lot of natural gas. In the summer, they don’t need nearly as much. TGP’s new PowerServe service is meant to give them a way to grab only what they need, when they need it. Part of the PowerServe service will be tied to a pipeline not yet built–TGP’s Northeast Energy Direct pipeline that will cross parts of Massachusetts and New Hampshire…
In a shameless act of political pandering, the president of the Massachusetts State Senate, Stan Rosenberg (Democrat), ran his own version of a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) scoping hearing. Such hearings, while meant to elicit useful information about where a pipeline should, and should not, run, usually devolve into freak shows by anti-drilling zealots who parade and preen before the cameras and microphones–making fools of themselves. We’ve seen it many times before. So Rosenberg, apparently not satisfied that there’s not a FERC hearing every week where anti-drilling zealots in Mass. can gripe and moan and complain, set up his own faux session. He “listened” to some 60 people complain about the proposed Kinder Morgan Northeast Energy Direct pipeline. Stan says he’s going to hand deliver transcriptions of the entire sordid affair to FERC, personally…
Both Kinder Morgan and Spectra Energy are in a tough fight to build pipelines from the Marcellus into New England. One of the competing visions for how to get more natural gas to residents, businesses and electric generating plants that so desperately need natural gas is to import it through the Everett, MA LNG import terminal. That’s where GDF Suez, the American name for the French multinational electric utility company Engie, imports natural gas. We told you about GDF Suez’s self interested last year (see 
A year ago OPEC, composed of a group of America’s enemies, decided they would try to bankrupt the American shale energy industry by pumping as much oil as they could, driving the price of oil and natural gas into the subbasement. Good for consumers! Not so good for oil and gas drillers and the energy industry at large. Now that OPEC’s strategy, led by Saudi Arabia, has not worked, OPEC is ready to start talking with American shale producers to see if they can trick us into joining them in circumventing the free market. They want us to cooperate with them to restrict oil and gas output and drive prices back up. We sincerely hope America shale producers don’t do it. We need to bankrupt the Middle Eastern countries that have waged a war of terrorism on us for years. Tell them to pound sand–they certainly have enough of it…
One of our favorite Seeking Alpha author/analysts, Richard Zeits, has just published another sterling piece analyzing the profound impact the Marcellus/Utica has had on the natural gas market in the United States. In January 2014, Zeits wrote a piece predicting the Marcellus/Utica would hit 20 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of production “within 3-4 years,” which at the time seemed wildly ambitious (see 
We have a troubling development to report about the future of drilling in West Virginia–something that has happened largely under the radar, until now. More than 200 residents in WV (likely those who don’t own the mineral rights under their land) began filing “scores” of “nuisance” lawsuits over the past couple of years against Antero Resources and Hall Drilling, in places like Doddridge County. The lawsuits claim excessive traffic, odors and noise from nearby drilling make it “impossible” for them to enjoy their homes. Each lawsuit has its own unique circumstances and should be handled separately–one size does not fit all. The troubling development is that all of these lawsuits (dozens? hundreds?) have been rolled up into one mega lawsuit that sits before the WV Mass Litigation Panel…