3 M-U Wells Drilled by DWS Break World Record for Longest Onshore
Deep Well Services (DWS), headquartered in Butler County, PA, is living up to the company name. DWS is one of our favorite oilfield services companies, born right here in the Marcellus/Utica. DWS specializes in “snubbing” work–completing those super-long laterals you read about. Earlier this year the company drilled three more record-breaking wells–the longest onshore wells ever drilled in the world! The current record-holding well drilled by DWS, completed just last quarter, is located in…
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New England “doesn’t produce a barrel of crude oil, a gallon of NGLs, or a cubic foot of natural gas.” All of the considerable quantity of fossil fuels the region uses for energy must be brought in–by pipeline (very few pipelines), truck, ship, or rail. Propane is one of the primary heating fuels used in New England. Guess where the region’s propane comes from, and how it gets there?
Once again the price of natural gas traded on the Henry Hub in south Louisiana, the NYMEX December futures contract, has tanked. The price fell $0.30 yesterday to close at $2.70/Mcf. There were two primary reasons why: (1) The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) released a storage report last Friday showing storage levels are near record-highs (too much supply), and (2) longer range weather models show temps staying warm (not enough demand).
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Oilfield Basics signs partnership agreement with PIOGA; Marcellus Utica Virtual Conference 2020 (video); ShalePro Energy Services profile; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Tellurian’s Souki seeks new Asia gas deals after Petronet rebuff; NATIONAL: Pipeline Prosperity (video); The great American LNG comeback; In shadow of pandemic, pipeline companies eye efficiency until market stabilizes; Trump races clock on remaining environmental rollbacks; INTERNATIONAL: Equinor sees oil demand peaking two-three years sooner due to virus.
We hoped it wouldn’t happen, but warned you it might when Gulfport Energy announced several weeks ago it had missed a debt payment and was in “restructuring” talks (see 
EOG Resources, one of the largest oil and gas drillers in the U.S. (with operations in Trinidad and China too) has just sold *all* of its Marcellus assets located in Bradford County, PA to (we’ll tell you below, MDN has the exclusive on this) for $130 million. EOG has now left the M-U building.
In August Southwestern Energy announced it is buying out and merging in Montage Resources in an all-stock deal (see 
Once again PTT Global Chemical is changing the timeline for a final investment decision (FID) to build a $10 billion ethane cracker plant in Belmont County, OH–for the umpteenth time. The most recent timeline had a decision coming by the end of this year or in the first quarter of next year. Whoops, they did it again! The new timeline is now “at least the middle of 2021.”
When a pipeline company considers whether or not to build a new pipeline, the company conducts an “open season”–a time when drillers (producers) can sign long-term contracts to use capacity along the pipeline. Such contracts guarantee pipeline companies will be able to make back the considerable amount of money they have to spend to build the pipeline. What happens when a driller that signed to a 10- or 20-year contract goes bankrupt? Or what happens if a contract will force a driller into bankruptcy? Can such a contract be canceled?
Here’s a little known fact: Fracking for natural gas in shale only extracts about 20% of the methane gas that’s trapped in shale rock, meaning (of course) that 80% of the gas gets left behind. Researchers with the Dept. of Energy’s (DOE) Los Alamos National Laboratory have made what we consider an astonishing breakthrough discovery: Too much pressure used during fracking actually locks some of the methane away tighter in the shale, instead of loosening it. In a published paper revealing their results (full copy below), researchers recommend a range of pressures to use to optimize (increase) recovery rates for methane in the Marcellus.
Like a bad Stephen King horror flick, the Sisters of the Corn (our name for a group of leftist nuns in Lancaster County, PA) have returned to file yet another frivolous lawsuit against Williams over a pipeline that crosses their land–a pipeline (Atlantic Sunrise) that has been up and running for years. The Sisters claim an infringement of their “religious liberties” in the lawsuit. They tried this argument once before and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.