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EQT & Equinor Land Swap in Pennsylvania & Ohio Now Completed
In April, EQT Corporation and Equinor (formerly known as Statoil) announced a deal to swap land in Pennsylvania and Ohio (see Equinor Swaps Acreage with EQT in PA & OH, Exits Operated US Shale). EQT filed an SEC report to announce that the deal was done as of last Friday. As we highlighted in our previous post about this deal in April, Equinor has (with this deal) completely exited all operated assets in U.S. shale.
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Why are we not surprised? We’ve been tracking the up down up down up down situation at Freeport LNG since it came online in 2019. Freeport was mostly offline this year following an episode of cold temps in January (see 
NATIONAL: Environmentalism in America is dead; U.S. natgas jumps with much hotter weather expected in western states; INTERNATIONAL: EU, Japan hydrogen players ink partnership agreements; Oil tumbles as OPEC plan adds to bearish momentum; LNG investments to jump over 50 percent in 2029; Europe’s natgas prices soar on sudden supply outage in Norway.
On May 23, the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) issued a pooling order to Encino Energy that combines a number of properties into a single unit for drilling wells. The total of the surface land pooled is 1,081.076 acres, located in Stock Township, Harrison County, Ohio. There are 121 (!) properties or pieces of property involved, largely due to the unit passing under what appears to be a housing development. This type of thing goes on frequently — the ODNR issuing a pooling order. What’s different and unusual about this one is that the ODRN appears to have denied a request by Encino to raise the penalty against those who refused to sign a lease but ended up being forced to participate anyway.
The country’s largest natural gas producer, EQT Corporation, headquartered in Pittsburgh and solely focused on drilling in the Marcellus/Utica, previously announced it had sliced 1 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of its production as of late February because of the ongoing low price of natgas (see 
It’s kind of interesting to watch how the left operates. Especially the left’s favored mouthpieces that pretend to be objective news media when, in fact, it is the opposite — they are partisan hacks serving the extremist wing of the Democrat Party. We’re referring to the “news” outlet Capital & Main, a hard-left propaganda outfit based in California. Their latest attack is against CNX Resources’ Vice President of External Relations, Brian Aiello. A recent Capital & Main article refers to Aiello, who is in upper management at CNX, as a “lobbyist” four different times to drive home and make stick an inaccurate label. It’s kind of funny, actually, coming from partisan hacks. We’re going to refer to C&M as partisan hacks a few more times, just to drive home the point. 🙂
Dominion Energy plans to build four small “peaker” electric generating plants in Chesterfield County, VA, a Richmond suburb (see 
Folks, we’re not trying to beat a dead horse here, but we have to point out how the Biden administration is actively (right now) attacking the natural gas industry. You need to know this so you can educate others on what’s happening and so that you know why it’s so important that we dislodge the Bidenistas from the D.C. swamp in November. We’ll summarize the main points right here. The Biden administration is currently attacking natgas in three ways: via the EPA, FERC, and pausing LNG export approvals.
Two weeks ago, the bottom pretty much fell out of the U.S. rig count, both nationally and for the Marcellus/Utica region. We hit new lows for both counts (see 
Coterra Energy announced a large layoff of employees at its GDS (GasSearch Drilling Services) Marcellus operation yesterday. GDS was founded in 2006 as a subsidiary of Cabot Oil & Gas (now Coterra Energy). GDS is based in South Montrose, PA, and provides services including pad site development, impoundment construction, water hauling, trucking, light equipment rental, and roustabout services supporting Coterra’s natural gas drilling. GDS employs approximately 170 people in Susquehanna County at various locations. Yesterday, 55 GDS employees got a pink slip.
Two weeks ago, 16 new permits were issued to drill in the Marcellus/Utica region. Last week, May 20-26, the number increased by two to 18. Two drillers tied for the top prize for most new permits. Chesapeake Energy received five new permits, all of them for drilling in Sullivan County, PA. Ascent Resources also received five new permits, with four of them to drill in Jefferson County, OH, and one in Guernsey County, OH. Antero received three permits for drilling in Wetzel County, WV. EQT Corporation got two permits to drill in Washington County, PA. Range Resources, Olympus Energy, and INR each got a single new permit (see below for where).
Anti-fossil fuelers and some residents with portions of the 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) traversing their land are flooding the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) with comments asking the agency to delay permission for MVP to be placed into service. The latest in-service date MVP outlined to FERC in a recent request for startup permission is “early June” (see 
On Monday, the socialists of the European Union (EU) adopted into law a new regulation aimed at tracking and reducing methane emissions within the energy sector. The onerous new reg introduces new requirements for measuring, reporting, and verifying methane emissions. The reg mandates operators to measure emissions at the source and submit monitoring reports verified by independent bodies. What does this have to do with the Marcellus/Utica? If drillers want to export LNG to any country that’s part of the EU (many M-U drillers do export LNG to Europe), they will have to comply with these new regs. According to MiQ, an independent methane emissions measurement and certification authority, its certification is the only one that satisfies the EU’s new regulation.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts that the natural gas consumed for electricity generation this summer in the United States will reach near (or match) the record high set last year. In the agency’s May 2024 Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), EIA forecasts natural gas consumed to generate electricity will average 44.7 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in the U.S. during the peak summer months of June through August, matching the record high set in the summer of 2023. Over the past few years, the balance of sources of electricity generation in the United States — especially in the summer — has shifted to more renewables and natural gas and less coal.