Enverus Rig Count @ 543 (-12); Marcellus @ 33 (-2), Utica @ 11 (-1)
After record gains since the beginning of the year, the Enverus U.S. rig count slid backwards over the past week, for the week ending May 19. The national rig count fell by 12, while the Marcellus lost two rigs (one each in the wet and dry gas regions), and the Utica lost one rig. The combined M-U now has 44 active rigs. The Haynesville in Louisiana (and East Texas), the main competitor to the M-U, lost one rig and now operates 50 active rigs.
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NATIONAL: Natural gas combined-cycle plant use varies by region and age; Economics continue to improve in US shale basins but operators hold steady; U.S. shale is finally giving shareholders a payday; John Kerry says U.S. does not ‘necessarily’ have to stop eating red meat; INTERNATIONAL: Energy transition clouds oil-gas outlook despite post-pandemic boost – Woodmac.
We’ve written many articles about the potential PTT cracker plant since April 2015 when PTT, a huge petrochemical company based in Thailand, first announced they would consider building an ethane cracker plant in Ohio (see 
Over the years we’ve covered a number of stories about companies buying future royalty payments from landowners (and rights owners) for an upfront, one lump sum payment now. Normally the deals don’t disclose how much money changed hands for those upfront payments. We have some recent transactions from a newcomer to the Marcellus/Utica, a company willing to announce how much they paid to buy those rights, which caught our attention. We have financial details for a deal in the Marcellus, and details for a deal in the Utica to share with you. We have hard numbers for how much they paid to buy those royalty rights.
We spotted an interesting article on the Forbes website about microproppants–really really tiny particles of sand or ceramic beads–and how the smaller the size of the proppant, the more likely it is to keep cracks in shale rock open and flowing natural gas and oil. In the Utica Shale, for example, a special kind of microproppant called DEEPROP will yield an additional revenue of $315,000 – $585,000 per thousand feet drilled. Show me the money!
In March 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to enter the public consciousness, some 500 people from labor unions and industry met in Pittsburgh to launch an organization called Pittsburgh Works Together (PWT), dedicated to fighting back against those who want to end southwest PA industries including steel, natural gas, and petrochemicals (see 
No doubt you heard about the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, a pipeline that flows a significant amount of refined products (gasoline and diesel fuel) from the Gulf Coast where it’s refined as far north as New Jersey. Most of the gasoline supply for states like North and South Carolina comes from the Colonial Pipeline. When the pipeline went offline for over a week, most gas stations in NC ran out of gas. It was panic city across the state. The outage pointed out the weakness of having most of a state’s supply of fuel provided by a single pipeline. Top officials in NC are equally (perhaps more) concerned that most of the state’s natural gas supply comes from a single interstate pipeline: the mighty Williams Transco pipeline.
Last November Gulfport Energy, the third-largest driller in the Ohio Utica Shale (by the number of wells drilled), filed for a “pre-arranged” Chapter 11 bankruptcy (see 
New York State has become outright hostile to any business remotely connected to fossil fuels. NY is prejudiced and discriminates against oil and natural gas. The latest example is a “bitcoin miner” that uses natural gas to produce electricity to power some serious computers. Even though the company is doing its best to atone for its “sin” of using natural gas via buying indulgences (aka carbon offsets), environmentalist wackos still oppose the facility located in Dresden, near beautiful Seneca Lake (one of New York’s Finger Lakes) in the central part of the state.
Ohio’s House Bill (HB) 6 law granted billions (plural) of dollars to FirstEnergy in an attempt to prop up the company’s economically failing nuclear power plants. FirstEnergy bribed state legislators to pass, and keep passed, HB 6 by paying out $61 million to a small group of insiders, including the now-former Speaker of the House (see 
The International Energy Agency (IEA) is in somebody’s back pocket–like Saudi Arabia, or maybe some of the other OPEC members. How do we know? The IEA has just published a nonsensical “report” called “Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector” (full copy below). In the report, IEA makes the preposterous claim that if the world (i.e. the U.S.) doesn’t stop all new drilling for oil and gas right now, today, the earth will toast itself into oblivion by 2050. As we so often say, follow the money.
Our friend Mark Mathis at the Clear Energy Alliance has done it again. Mark has produced another fantastic, short video (4 1/2 minutes long) that superbly explains the modern “climate crisis” panic that we see being forced on the public day after day by a compliant media. We are told by very stupid people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Occasional-Cortex) that we have just 10-12 years and then it’s all over. We’re done. We’re toasted. Because we continue to burn fossil fuels. She’s a certifiable idiot. Why do large multi-national corporations, Big Green groups, and others continue to promote her wildly wrong theories and Green New Deal? As Mark so eloquently summarizes: panic = profit. People are making money from this gigantic global warming hoax.
All three M-U states received permits to drill new shale wells last week. Pennsylvania received a sizable 14 new permits (after receiving 18 permits the previous week). The majority of those permits were for wells on three pads in northeastern PA. Ohio received 3 new permits last week all in one county (Greene) for one driller (Eclipse, now owned by Southwestern Energy) on one well pad. And West Virginia received a sizable 13 new permits with 9 of them split between two well pads for different drillers (Northeast Natural Energy and Tug Hill).