Court Approves Rockdale Marcellus Plan to Finish Closing the Doors
Last September MDN broke the news that Rockdale Marcellus had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania (see NEPA Driller Rockdale Marcellus Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy). In January we told you that Repsol had won an auction to buy the assets for $220 million in cash, plus the assumption of $2 million in debt owed to trade creditors (see Sale of Rockdale PA Assets to Repsol Closes – $220M Cash, $2M Debt). After the sale to Repsol and payments to key creditors, there’s still a small pot of cash ($17.7 million) leftover. Rockdale’s plan to distribute it and other miscellaneous assets to some of the remaining creditors, and close the doors forever, was approved last week by the bankruptcy court.
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One of the hottest of the hot sectors in which to invest (right now) is shale energy. That’s according to multiple sources, including a veteran finance writer, investor, engineer, and researcher. In an article appearing on the OilPrice.com website, Alex Kimani talks up mid-cap energy stocks as outperforming the supermajors. Among two of Kimani’s top three picks are two Marcellus/Utica drillers, who are having a stellar year in stock performance. We went looking for the stock performance of other M-U drillers too. We have a list to share showing just how much each driller’s share price has increased this year.
GAI Consultants, headquartered in Pittsburgh, is a planning, engineering & environmental consulting firm serving clients in the energy, transportation, development, government, and industrial markets. GAI has been in business since 1958 and has served the oil and gas industry since the early 1980s. The shale industry was a big boom for GAI’s business. Shale is helping GAI to grow again–exponentially. GAI announced last Friday the company has expanded further into the oil and gas industry with the acquisition of PGH Petroleum & Environmental Engineers LLC, headquartered in Austin, Texas.
Despots and dictators the world over are the same, whether it’s Vladimir Putin relabeling his naked aggression of outright war against Ukraine a “military operation,” or New York State’s so-called Climate Action Council relabeling natural gas as “fossil gas.” Tyrants seek to relabel those things they can’t control in an attempt to pressure, hoodwink, and manipulate the masses–to force others into doing what they (the tyrants) want done. The Communists who run NY state can’t convince the population to self-immolate by giving up the use of natural gas, so they’re changing the language, hoping to convince more people to go along with their harebrained plan to dump the use of all “fossil fuels.” The left’s plan is energy suicide and a majority of New Yorkers instinctively know it.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Natural gas line project starting in Mahoning County; NATIONAL: Biden increases oil royalty rate, scales back lease sales; Biden puts the lie to all of Democrats’ arguments about fossil fuels; US weekly LNG exports down by four; The United States ended the winter with the least natural gas in storage in three years; Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is being fed by America’s lack of energy independence; Natural gas price surge looks here to stay in increasingly bullish backdrop.
As we have in previous years, MDN will not publish today (Friday) in observance of Good Friday and the Easter holiday. We hope you enjoy this blessed time of year!
Ace reporter Paul Gough at the Pittsburgh Business Times has scored another exclusive. At least we can’t find any other mentions online about this latest, very big news. EQT Corporation has signed a memorandum of understanding to partner with ElementUS Rare Earths & Minerals, a Louisiana company, to potentially build a plant somewhere in the Marcellus/Utica region to process rare earth minerals that are “used in industry for everything from fuel cells to batteries, magnets for electric vehicles and insulator coatings.” The project is called ASCEND. Why is EQT interested in rare earths?
Yesterday the “front month” price of natural gas trading on the NYMEX Henry Hub closed at $7/MMBtu, the highest NYMEX price in 13.5 years (since Nov. 10, 2008). It was just two days we told you the NYMEX price was making a run for $7, closing at $6.64 on Monday (see 
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat, has (for months) forcefully pushed the issue of completing the 94% done-and-in-the-ground Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) project, a 303-mile pipeline from WV into Virginia. In early March Manchin let all five Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) commissioners know of his displeasure that MVP, along with other pipeline projects, is delayed (see 
MDN has highlighted Capstone Turbine Corporation, a California company that manufactures small electric-generating plants that run on natural gas, several times in the past (
A story out of Port St. Joe, Florida, involving LNG, caught our attention for a couple of reasons. Nopetro LNG plans to construct and operate as many as three liquefaction trains that will liquefy up to 3.86 billion cubic feet per year of natural gas for export and delivery to markets in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. That’s 3.86 Bcf for an entire year, not per day. Modern facilities that export LNG from the Gulf Coast, like Sabine Pass, export close to 4 Bcf per day. The facility proposed by Nopetro is minuscule in comparison. It will receive natural gas from St. Joe Natural Gas Company Inc. Nopetro recently asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to declare that it (FERC) does not have jurisdiction and regulation over such a tiny facility. FERC agreed!
Although a number of publicly-traded oil and natural gas companies have gone along with so-called ESG (environmental, social, and governance) programs and have pledged to reduce their so-called carbon footprint by X percentage by Y date, apparently O&G companies are not genuflecting far enough or fast enough for Big Green Nazis like Bloomberg. The latest laughable tactic we’ve noticed is that Bloomberg has taken to carbon-shaming, you know, like fat-shaming–the use of ridicule and bullying as a pressure tactic to imply a person isn’t “enough” because of their weight (or race, or economic status, or carbon emanations). Leftists like Bloomberg “News” are so predictable–they always fall into the same tired routines. Are oil and gas companies not dancing to your tune? Use the blowtorch pulpit you have (a news service) to try and shame them into doing it. We say to Bloomberg, blow your carbon-shaming out your (ahem) Bloomberg Terminal…