Ohio Cancels Forced Pooling Hearings Due to COVID-19 Virus
In Ohio forced pooling is called “unitization.” When a landowner/leaseholder owns 65% of the mineral rights under property in a given location and wants to pool other neighboring properties into an oil or gas drilling unit, that landowner/leaseholder files a request with the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management. The Division head then schedules a hearing to consider the request. All such hearings scheduled for this week are now canceled and will be rescheduled. Furthermore, the Division will only be able to accept new unitization requests on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and they will only return phone calls about unitization on Fridays. All due to the COVID-19 coronavirus.
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Drilling, whirring, humming, thumping, grinding, engines running, hammering, back-up warning beeps, banging, clanging. Those are the sounds of progress happening in Chester County, PA. Contrary to the griping and moaning mainstream media reports about those who live near Mariner East 2 (ME2) pipeline construction, the sounds of ME2 construction are music for at least one local resident because he knows about the economic prosperity this project will bring to the region.
Electric power generator FirstEnergy (now called Energy Harbor Corp.) pulled off what we consider the biggest case of deception in the history of Ohio by pressuring Ohio legislators and a RINO governor to sign into law a bill to force Ohio residents to pay the company $1 billion so it can keep open two uneconomic/failing nuclear power plants (see 
There is an increasing call from economists to “let the free market” determine who lives and who dies in the oil and gas industry. We won’t lie–we live in dire times. We don’t know what the outcome will eventually be. While the world is gripped in COVID-19 coronavirus panic, the Saudis and Russians have flooded the world markets with oil, forcing the price of oil to collapse. Now our own economists are writing that shale companies already teetering on the brink of bankruptcy should be allowed to go under. Don’t prolong the agony. There were already on the way out. But is that wise?
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Biggest weekly gainer in S&P 500 is Cabot Oil & Gas!; Susquehanna County has more than half of top producing PA gas wells!; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Developing bottlenecks in the Louisiana gas market; NATIONAL: Oil price recovery not likely until 2022; recent pullbacks ‘just the beginning’; E&Ps, OFS operators cutting capex and salaries as Covid-19 reshapes markets; Four more producers line up to slash capex, activity in wake of low oil prices; Can shale survive another bust?; It’s not Armageddon for America’s oil and gas industry; INTERNATIONAL: Another specter rises over LNG as European demand seen threatened by coronavirus; Saudi Arabia-Russia oil price feud hits U.S. economy hard.
Mountaineer NGL Storage is planning to build an NGL (primarily ethane) storage operation in Monroe County, OH, located just across the river (and border) from West Virginia. Last summer David Hooker, president of Mountaineer and president of the parent company Energy Storage Ventures (located in Denver, Colo.) announced the project had received all necessary permits to begin construction, and that construction “could” begin by the end of March this year (see 
One of our favorite Energy in Depth writers, Nicole Jacobs, has just published a great post that outlines the huge impact new natural gas-fired (mostly Utica Shale gas) power plants have had and will have in Ohio. She includes a list of 10 projects either already built and running, under construction, or on the books to get built. When you add up the total capacity for all 10 plants, they will generate an amazing 9,215 megawatts of electricity, enough to power upward of 9 million homes! The companies building those 10 plants are investing $15.9 billion. This is huge for Ohio’s economy.
In a disappointing decision, Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court recently ruled a long-running lawsuit filed against Grant Township (Indiana County, PA) will continue on through the court system. For the past several years we’ve reported on the case of Grant Township, a town that passed an ordinance cooked up by the radical Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) to try and block a state-approved injection well. Part of the ordinance was tossed. However, Commonwealth Court has decided the town can continue to try and make a case that it should be able to override state law with its home-cooked regulations because by doing so they will somehow protect citizens’ health, which the town says is allowed under PA’s poorly-written Environmental Rights Amendment (ERA).
If you operate a company that sells a product (particularly a commodity product) you only have two ways of making a profit: Sell the product for more money or cut expenses (or both). For oil drillers, the price of the product sold is pretty much fixed. Some drillers have “hedged” their production, pre-selling future production at a specific price. But many don’t hedge. And hedging contracts typically don’t extend beyond a year. In the case of oil, the world market sets the price, and the price this week is about half of what it was last week. That means most shale oil drillers won’t make a profit–unless they can trim costs. One of the ways drillers are attempting to cut costs is by asking the companies that do the actual drilling and perform services for them (oilfield services companies, or OFS) to cut the rate they charge.
Back in the day, your humble editor, Jim Willis, worked first an intern and later as a paid staffer in the Ronald Reagan White House. Very cool experience for a hick kid from Upstate New York. After a stint at the White House, Jim stayed in D.C. and went to work on Capitol Hill, working for Congresswoman Helen Bentley (Republican from Maryland). One of Bentley’s favorite issues was to fight against the dumping of machine tools by foreign companies on the American market. Companies in other counties would sell machine tools here more cheaply than it cost them to make, using backdoor funding from their governments to make up the difference. Eventually, our machine tool companies couldn’t compete and would go out of business, leaving the market wide open to foreign competitors, at which time they would jack their prices up.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Clean Hands Andy, in stunning reversal, endorses natural gas?; DCNR, DEP are canceling or converting meetings to calls or online due to coronavirus concerns; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Judge approves $143M natural gas explosions settlement; NATIONAL: U.S. crude oil exports increased to nearly 3 million barrels per day in 2019; More U.S. oil producers slash budgets amid price rout; US oil, gas rig count drops by three on week to 835; further decline expected; Betting on a bailout, investors rush into U.S. energy funds; UW professors receive provisional patent for method to reduce gas flaring; U.S. shale oil producers aren’t as hedged as you think, implying more downside for associated gas production; Angry US landowners are killing off renewable energy projects; INTERNATIONAL: How long will the oil price war actually last?; A global natural gas market is starting to emerge.
The 600-mile Dominion Energy Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) project has completed about 35 miles of the project and that’s it. Why? Lawsuits, brought by Big Green groups. The biggest challenge the project faces is a lawsuit that ruled ACP could not cross under the Appalachian Trail. Dominion appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court where it now sits. By all accounts, the recent oral arguments before the Supremes went well for ACP (see