Baker Hughes Axes their Quarterly Well Count Report :-(
In July 2013 Baker Hughes, the third largest oilfield services company in the U.S. that’s being forced to merge with Halliburton, the second largest oilfield services company, started a useful new quarterly report called the well count report (see BH Launches Well Count Report, Perfect Compliment to Rig Count). You know Baker Hughes as the company that releases weekly and monthly rig count data. Just yesterday our lead story was the latest rig count stats from BH (see BIG Decrease in BH Rig Counts, Including Marcellus/Utica). BH has counted and reported the number of active rigs drilling for the past 70+ years. With rigs becoming more efficient–fewer of them drilling more wells–it made sense to add a report that would track the number of new wells spud, or new wells started, in a given period of time. That was the quarterly well report. Unfortunately BH has just announced they are immediately discontinuing the well report, less than two years after they launched it…
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Katie McGinty is one of the Ed Rendell retreads employed by current PA Gov. Tom Wolf. She’s one of two former DEP Secretaries (under Rendell) working for Wolf. In fact, she is Tom Wolf’s chief of staff–arguably the second-most powerful person in Harrisburg after the governor himself. We’ve previously chronicled her background and how she might influence Wolf on Marcellus drilling matters (see 
Here’s how mainstream media and “environmentalists” collude to lie to you. First, a group of virulent anti-fossil fuelers sit around a conference table at the William Penn Foundation, or Heinz Foundation, or Sierra Club, or NRDC, or take-your-pick. Maybe they all have a big confab on Martha’s Vineyard–many pinheads are better than one. They sit there in a room heated by natural gas using electricity created with natural gas (or coal), sitting on chairs made from petrochemicals, and sitting there in clothes made from petrochemicals (fossil fuels) to talk about ending fossil fuels. The environmentalists talk about which issues poll well and scare the most people with respect to fracking. Everyone decides “cancer” is a great one. Yeah, we’ll use cancer. “How do you get cancer?” asks one them at the confab. “From radiation,” comes the response from one good little LibDem. “What if we could tie cancer to fracking? Wouldn’t that be great?!” Everyone cheers. How to do it…how to do it. “I know! Radon! We’ll convince everyone that fracked gas creates clouds and plumes of suffocating radon and that radon will kill ’em by giving them cancer.” Horray! Next step: Find willing accomplices in the scientific community that can be bought off with grant money to “study” the issue and publish a pre-determined anti-fracking outcome in a peer-reviewed journal (see 
Baker Hughes, the company known for its publicly available rig count data (and it’s pink drill bits use in breast cancer awareness) yesterday published its official monthly rig count tally for March. In the public press release BH notes that (our language) rig counts have fallen off a cliff. The U.S. land-based rig count, most of which are used to drill in shale plays, sunk to 1,067, down 238 rigs from February (which is 18% in a single month), and down 683 from March 2014 (which is 39%). Not a pretty picture. MDN wondered if the same trend held for the Marcellus/Utica, so we ran the numbers for PA, OH and WV…
It’s an LNG love story. Yesterday Shell announced they are buying BG Group, the former British Gas, for $69.7 billion dollars. To put it in perspective, in 1998 Exxon bought Mobil for $80 billion, forming what is now ExxonMobil. So this is that kind of scale–really really huge. The oil and gas industry is buzzing about the deal. Is this the first of many such consolidations, given the low price of oil? Will the Shell/BG deal impact shale drilling? What does it ultimately mean? We’ll leave it to others to discuss the broader implications. What we always wonder is, how will this affect the Marcellus/Utica? We have a few thoughts. Both Shell and BG have acreage in the Marcellus/Utica. But before we get to that, the first thing to understand about the Shell/BG deal is that it’s about LNG. This merger will make Shell the largest player in the global LNG market–easily twice the size of the nearest competitor…
The Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources last week ordered the operator of five injection wells–all located in one area in Vienna Township (Trumbull County), OH–to close them all down. That somewhat radical action came following a finding that some of the frack wastewater meant to go down into the wells for injection had instead ended up in a nearby pond and wetland, contaminating both. The operator of the five injection wells is Kleese Development Associates of Warren, OH…