Chesapeake Energy Update: Cutting Rig Count & Production in 2023
Chesapeake Energy issued its quarterly and 2022 annual update yesterday. The company drills primarily for natural gas in both the Marcellus and Haynesville shale plays. Chesapeake’s net production in 4Q22 was approximately 4.05 Bcfe/d (90% natural gas and 10% total liquids), utilizing an average of 14 rigs to drill 58 wells and place 66 wells on production. That was for drilling across all of its shale plays, including the oily Eagle Ford. However, given the crash in prices for natural gas, CEO Nick Dell’Osso said the company is cutting rigs this year–axing two rigs in the Haynesville and one in the Marcellus.
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Yesterday morning Harrison County, OH, commissioners got a face-to-face update from Encino Energy’s director of external affairs, Jackie Stewart. You may recall that Encino bought out and took over all of Chesapeake Energy’s existing Ohio assets–both shale and non-shale–in November 2018 for $2 billion (see 
Big Green is Big Business–especially in Pennsylvania, where leftist groups routinely file a blizzard of lawsuits against the shale industry. Some Big Green groups receive funding from foreign sources, including Russia and China. They seem to have endless pools of money to litigate every square inch of new pipeline and every proposed new well pad. As if being repeatedly sued isn’t enough, these disgusting groups want the fossil fuel industry to pay them for their lawyers! When the groups are the ones filing the lawsuits!! The Democrat judges of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in a poorly reasoned decision issued yesterday, have granted Big Green the power to sue, and then get paid for suing.
Since 2015 we’ve reported on the case of Grant Township (Indiana County, PA), a town that passed an ordinance cooked up by the radical Big Green group Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) to try and block a state-approved injection well proposed by Pennsylvania General Energy (
Last summer then-Gov. Tom Wolf instructed the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) to conduct a comprehensive review of conventional oil and gas driller compliance with an eye on locating enough dirt to justify creating onerous new regulations for the industry (see 
Yes, you can “phone it in” for your job if you work in the oil and gas industry. According to search firm Piper-Morgan Search, remote work, at least for some jobs in oil and gas, “is an established reality now and it’s not going away.” Some workers are 100% remote and don’t (or won’t) go into an office to do their job. How cool is that? Of course, like many industries, not every job can be done remotely. Which type of O&G jobs can be done remotely?
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: GOP lawmaker plans to introduce bill to ‘eliminate’ RGGI regulation; NATIONAL: A Marshall Plan for energy security.
Finally! The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has granted permission to the Freeport LNG facility, located in Quintana, Texas, to restart two of three liquefaction “trains,” two of three LNG storage tanks, and one of two LNG births for ships to tie up and load. While the third train and third storage tank will need further FERC permission, Freeport predicts the entire facility–all three trains and the infrastructure that supports them–will be online and producing the maximum 2 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) within “the next several weeks.”
Chesapeake Energy has cut a deal to sell a second portion of its remaining Eagle Ford assets to U.K. chemical company INEOS Energy for $1.4 billion. The deal includes 172,000 net acres and approximately 2,300 wells. It is the first time INEOS will own U.S. shale assets. In 2018 Chesapeake, under the direction of then-CEO Doug Lawler, purchased 420,000 net acres in the Eagle Ford shale and Austin Chalk formations in Texas from WildHorse Resource Development Corp for $4 billion (see 
Last week Antero Resources, which is 100% focused on the Marcellus/Utica with over 500,000 net acres under lease (and the largest M-U driller in West Virginia), issued its fourth quarter and full-year 2022 update. Antero management says the company can better handle low commodity prices for natural gas than other M-U drillers because (a) it sells 100% of its production outside of the M-U region, and (b) nearly half of the company’s revenues come from liquids, not methane.
Spanish-owed Repsol owns 214,000 net acres of leases in the Marcellus Shale, primarily located in northeastern Pennsylvania in Bradford, Susquehanna, and Tioga counties. Early last year (in January 2022), Repsol closed on a deal to buy Rockdale Marcellus out of bankruptcy for $222 million (see 
Equitrans Midstream, an important midstream (pipeline) company in the Marcellus/Utica, issued its fourth quarter and 2022 update yesterday. Equitrans is the builder and soon-to-be (hopefully!) operator of the 94% complete, 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) project. There were some important updates on the MVP project yesterday. Along with MVP, Equitrans owns and operates the Rager Mountain Gas Storage Area in Jackson Township, Cambria County, PA, which suffered a massive leak last year. Officials provided some updates on that situation as well.
UGI, a diversified energy company with midstream (pipeline) operations and one of PA’s largest utility companies, is planning to build a second LNG peak shaver. The peak shaver will be located in Middlesex Township in Cumberland County, PA. In November 2020, UGI launched the operation of a new 2 million gallon LNG peak shaver in Bethlehem, PA (see 
Why would a major pipeline company (or driller) decide to cede control of the future of its company to a group of international leftists hellbent on destroying fossil energy? The answer eludes us, but it has just happened again. Yesterday, pipeline giant Williams, which owns and operates (among other major assets) the Transco Pipeline system, announced it had joined the UN’s Oil & Gas Methane Partnership 2.0 (OGMP 2.0). Support for OGMP 2.0 is growing in the natgas marketplace in the U.S. We previously told you that Cheniere Energy’s LNG export plants are seeking certification under OGMP 2.0 (see