Range Resources Puts Louisiana, Some PA Assets Up for Sale
Range Resources turned in its fourth-quarter and full-year 2019 update on Friday. The company lost $1.72 billion last year, after losing $1.74 billion the year before. Ouch. The company is actively shopping its northern Louisiana shale assets hoping a sale will help reduce debt. You may recall Range bought out Memorial Resource Development Corp. (MRD) in a stock swap/debt assumption deal worth $4.4 billion back in 2016 (see Range Resources Buys Louisiana Driller in Deal Worth $4.4B).
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Southwestern Energy issued its 2019 update on Friday, with talk about what’s ahead for 2020. Southwestern is something of a unicorn. They made $891 million in profit for 2019! Even in a low price environment. Well done. Like every other Marcellus/Utica driller, Southwestern plans to spend less on drilling in 2020, yet they also say they will produce more gas, and sell it at favorable prices. What’s Southwestern’s magic?
In January MDN told you about a Franklin & Marshall College poll that showed 48% of Pennsylvania voters support a ban on fracking, while 39% oppose a ban (see 
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Yesterday the largest natural gas producing company in the United States, EQT, issued its fourth-quarter and full-year 2019 update. As is typical with these updates, EQT’s top brass (CEO Toby Rice) also spoke about the company’s strategy for the coming year. Of particular note is that EQT has struck a new deal with EQM Midstream (Equitrans) to get lower fees for gathering and piping the company’s natgas–a $535 million break in fees (see today’s companion story). Also of note was Toby’s comments about trimming the company’s debt load of $5.3 billion by about 30%, or $1.5 billion, this year. How does he plan to do that?
Both EQT (the driller) and Equitrans (the midstream company) issued their quarterly/full-year 2019 updates yesterday. Equitrans, formerly EQT Midstream, separated from EQT in November 2018. Equitrans, via its EQM Midstream affiliate, gathers, processes, and flows most of EQT’s natural gas production, getting it to market. Last fall EQT began intense negotiations with Equitrans to lower its midstream costs (see 
While the Andrew Cuomo-corrupted New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) can claim a victory in stopping the much-needed Constitution Pipeline (see 
In April 2017 (almost three years ago) the Mariner East 1 pipeline sprung a small leak and spilled 20 barrels (~840 gallons) of ethane and propane in Berks County, near Philadelphia. Sunoco Logistics Partners, builder and maintainer of the pipeline, shut it down and fixed it over the next several days. Yesterday the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission announced a “settlement” with Sunoco, to fine the company $200,000. Sunoco, as part of the settlement, must also conduct a “remaining life” study of the pipeline. After all, it is almost 90 years old.
One of our favorite publications to read is the Pittsburgh Business Times. The PBT recently researched and published a list of the “
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a leftist Democrat who wants to succeed Tom Wolf as governor, likes to investigate accidents related to the shale industry to see if he can turn them into crimes (
Yesterday the Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office (IFO) released their latest quarterly Natural Gas Production Report for October through December 2019 (full copy below). It shows natgas production in PA rose 7.6% compared to the same period last year–to yet another new all-time high of 1,774.5 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of natural gas. Put another way, that’s nearly 1.8 TRILLION cubic feet of gas produced over a three-month period. There has now been an unbroken chain of quarter-over-quarter increases in horizontal shale gas production in PA for 14 consecutive quarters (3.5 years running).