MDN Off Today – Juneteenth 2023
Today, June 19th, is a stock exchange and bank holiday. Juneteenth is a federal holiday in the U.S. commemorating the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. Juneteenth marks the anniversary of the announcement of General Order No. 3 by Union Army General Gordon Granger on June 19, 1865, proclaiming freedom for enslaved people in Texas. Originating in Galveston, the holiday has since been celebrated annually on June 19 in various parts of the United States, often broadly celebrating African-American culture. The day was first recognized as a federal holiday in June 2021, when President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law. As with other bank holidays, MDN will not publish today.
In the summer of 2021, Patterson-UTI Energy, which operates 21 active rigs in the Marcellus/Utica (out of 49 active M-U rigs, nearly half of all active M-U rigs!), announced it was buying a smaller competitor, Pioneer Energy Services Corp. (see 
Even as the Bidenistas at the Dept. of Energy are deciding which regional hydrogen hub proposals to fund, and even though Pennsylvania, with its parochial application that competes against a much better application from West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky, the Democrats in the PA House are attempting to force any new hydrogen projects in the Keystone state to NOT use fossil fuels–namely Marcellus Shale gas. Yes, they are insane! PA Dems (led by State Rep. Greg Vitali) are about to screw up PA’s already long shot at grabbing one of the 6 to 8 regional hydrogen hub projects and $1 billion in funding by promoting House Bill (HB) 1215–written by the radicals of the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Talk about dumb. Wow!
In October 2021, Cimarex Energy, a Permian driller, and Cabot Oil & Gas, a Pennsylvania Marcellus driller, merged and renamed the company to Coterra Energy (see 
For individuals, discretionary income is what’s left after you pay your taxes and fixed costs like housing, food, and clothing. For shale drillers, the equivalent to discretionary income is cash flow from operating activities (CFOA), which is the net income a company generates adjusted for non-cash expenses like depreciation and stock-based compensation, and for changes in working capital. Drillers can use their extra cash to grow production by spending more for drilling new wells (capital expenditures or capex). Or drillers can send some of the extra cash back to investors via share buybacks and dividends. How did Marcellus/Utica drillers spend their CFOA during the first quarter of 2023?
The Bidenistas have put their anti-freedom, pro-tyranny agenda into overdrive. On Tuesday, the administration released its semi-annual Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, a report on the actions administrative agencies (part of the Executive Branch of government) plan to issue in the near- and long-term. Both the Interior and Energy departments are moving full speed ahead to try and lock in some of Biden’s most restrictive and punitive (to fossil energy) policies they can before the election, hoping to make it impossible to undo the damage after they lose the next election.
We’ve written about the sleazy practice of “sue and settle” in the past–a practice whereby government agencies like the EPA get their friends in the radical environmental movement to sue them, then they quickly settle the case and say, “See, we HAVE to do this because the court is making us do it.” (
New shale permits issued for Jun 5-11 in the Marcellus/Utica last week dipped a bit from the previous week. There were 20 new permits issued, down from 25 issued the previous week. Last week’s permit tally included 6 new permits for Pennsylvania, 8 new permits for Ohio, and 6 new permits in West Virginia. Ascent Resources scored the most new permits with 8 issued in the Ohio Utica, spread across three counties. Chesapeake Energy had the second most new permits with 6 permits issued in the PA Marcellus across two counties.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Air Products to supply Qatargas with LNG tech; INTERNATIONAL: Oil rises as growing demand in China calms rate-hike concerns; Europe gas spikes as major Dutch gas site set to close; Climate protesters throw paint and glue at Monet painting in Sweden; UN chief says fossil fuels ‘incompatible with human survival’.
The Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) recently released production numbers for the first quarter of 2023, and wow! What a surprise! Oil production in the northern Utica Shale skyrocketed, led by wells drilled by Encino Energy. According to an analysis by the Youngstown Business Journal, four shale wells drilled by Encino in Columbiana County have “shattered previous production figures in the county.” Adding up all oil production by all drillers, Encino had the most oil production in the state, with 53.7% of the total oil produced in the Utica/Point Pleasant during the first quarter. It certainly looks like Encino has cracked the oil code in the Buckeye State!
Business leaders in Pennsylvania are keeping the pressure on Gov. Josh “do nothing” Shapiro–hoping to get him to keep an implied promise to remove the state from the odious carbon tax scheme called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). During the gubernatorial campaign, Shapiro expressed doubts about RGGI, implying he would not support PA’s participation, a campaign lie we warned you about at the time (see 
We’re laughing our considerably fat rear-ends off at the Democrat leftists in Pennsylvania who continue to spit and sputter over a proposed name change for the state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). PA State Sen. Gene Yaw recently floated a bill (that has since passed a first committee vote) to change the name of the DEP to the Dept. of Environmental Services, as an indicator that the DEP should be less about policing and more about serving the public (see 
We’ve called attention to this for years now: The Marcellus/Utica, THE largest producing play in the U.S., is now stalled with respect to increasing production of natural gas. Why? Because we can’t build and complete any major new pipelines. Without more pipelines, the M-U is limited in how much it can produce. The situation is widely known. Yet another fact is evident: The U.S. continues to increase natural gas production. How? Other “non-core” plays (plays that don’t focus on gas) are seeing an increase in gas production from “private players,” according to a speaker at this week’s LDC Forum Northeast in Boston.