Montage Resources 2019 in Review, What’s Ahead in 2020
Montage Resources provided an update on fourth-quarter and full-year 2019 performance and what to expect in 2020 last Friday. You may recall Montage is the name of the company that resulted after the merger of Eclipse Resources with Blue Ridge Mountain Resources one year ago (see Blue Ridge Merges with Eclipse, Renamed to Montage Resources). Montage previously announced it will mainly focus on drilling Marcellus wells in Ohio (not a typo!). Perhaps most notable about the company update from Friday is that for three years running (consolidated numbers) the company has turned a profit–the largest profit being in 2019, with $31.8 million. That’s remarkable given the economic pickle drillers are in right now.
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Dueling rallies at the Capitol in Harrisburg, PA yesterday provide the perfect picture of the difference between reasonable and unreasonable, between behavior that is adult and behavior that is juvenile, between pro-fossil fuel and anti-fossil fuel. It was also the perfect picture to describe why there is now an open civil war in the PA Democrat Party, and why trade union members are leaving the Dems in droves. The two rallies were there to support (or oppose) House Bill (HB) 1100, aimed at attracting new petrochemical investments to the state.
At first efforts by the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) and its Marcellus Shale Energy and Environment Laboratory (launched five years ago) was aimed at tests to ensure fracking of shale wells (in all regions) does not harm the environment. It worked. NETL did prove that modern drilling and fracking is safe. Now the NETL mission has changed. New NETL tests launched across the country over the past year will help drillers understand how to frack even better than they do now! Yes, it can help drillers with their bottom line, but the purpose of NETL’s testing goes far beyond that.
Mudrock Energy is a consulting company based near Pittsburgh that provides specialized geoscience analysis and market research across the energy industry. Mudrock founder and CEO Dave Boyer, an AAPG Certified Petroleum Geologist, recently worked up an analysis of Pennsylvania’s shale production. He published his research on the Medium website and sent us a link with an encouragement to share it with the MDN audience. In his analysis, Boyer makes the case that PA’s continuing expansion of ever more production needs to stop. NOW.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is about as power-mad as former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Notice how Dems love to run other people’s lives for them? The latest attempt at total control of every citizen’s life is to ban the use of fossil fuels in the city. de Blasio recently announced his administration wants to end the use of natural gas and fuel oil in buildings throughout the city by 2040. What’s not entirely clear is whether he will force existing buildings to retrofit to all-electric (or steam created by electric, etc.), or whether this applies only to new buildings and those receiving renovations. Any way you slice it, NYC is heading for a disaster of biblical proportions if this policy gets adopted.
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Tellurian makes managements appointments; Columbia gas pleads guilty over Mass. pipeline blasts; NATIONAL: Climate change lawsuits collapsing like dominoes; Energy valuations: Freefall into bankruptcy or is this time different?; There are no winners in oil market’s price war; Brace yourself for another 33% drop in the price of crude oil; White House can lend U.S. shale a helping M&A hand; INTERNATIONAL: The coronavirus is an economic pandemic, panicking markets and slowing growth.
Some Pennsylvania state Democrats are obviously feeling the political heat over their opposition to House Bill (HB) 1100, meant to attract brand new business and jobs to the state in the petrochemical industry (see 
The U.S. Energy Information Administration is reporting several natural gas pipeline upgrades are either planned or under construction in New England. Four pipelines are expected to increase compression in their systems by 2023, adding more than 350 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of natural gas pipeline capacity into the region, despite the best-laid plans of antis to resist any new supplies of natural gas from reaching New England. As near as we can tell, two of the four upgrades will flow more Canadian gas, but the other two are likely to flow Marcellus gas.
We’ll be right upfront and say this article is a hard one for us to wrap our brains around. In order to explain something in simple terms, you must first understand it. We don’t fully understand the concepts discussed below, but feel it’s important to pass along anyway. In September 2018 MDN brought you an article about a concept called blockchain, and to some degree, bitcoin (see 
Last Friday MDN told you about an initiative in Arizona and five other states to block the right of local municipalities from banning natural gas appliances and natural gas heat from homes and businesses (see 
Something pretty dramatic happened last Friday in Vienna, Austria. For the past three years, Russia and a few other non-OPEC countries have coordinated and cooperated with Saudi Arabia (which runs OPEC) in order to control the price of oil worldwide. Russia (mainly) plus OPEC has been called OPEC+. Creative, no? Given the COVID-19 coronavirus worldwide scare (much more a scare than an actual pandemic), and given the pullback in many countries, like China, of reducing manufacturing with the consequence of reducing their need for oil, and given there is now a surplus of oil sloshing around the world, the Saudis are spooked and want to cut production, NOW, in order to avoid having the price of oil drop into the sub-basement. Last Friday Russia walked into OPEC HQ in Vienna and said nyet to any production cuts. Translation: OPEC+ is dead.
Over 700 people gathered yesterday in Columbus, OH for OOGA’s (Ohio Oil & Gas Association) 73rd Annual Meeting. Industry leaders soberly assessed the state of current affairs. According to OOGA president Matt Hammond, the industry may have to downsize for a while. Jeff Fisher, CEO of Ascent Resources, agreed. Hammond said, “it’s just going to look a little bit different in the next few years” before the price of gas rebounds. The sentiment was clearly what we’ve been preaching: Expect lower for longer when it comes to gas prices.