Shale Energy Stories of Interest: Fri, Jan 24, 2020
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Hilco’s $240 million bid for South Philly refinery wasn’t the highest offer, aggrieved creditors say; Former EQT CEO looking to help Houston energy tech company grow; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Statewide poll: New Jersey consumers want affordable natural gas; NATIONAL: Energy companies darken S&P 500 profit picture; Nearly 20,000MW of distributed natural gas capacity expected per annum; Trump draws battle lines against Democrats and ‘prophets of doom’ at Davos; Exxon isn’t the oil user. You are.; Natural gas buyers party like it’s 1999; U.S. LNG booms as natural gas prices crash.
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There is one court case in Pennsylvania that we’ve been concerned about since April 2018. The Briggs v Southwestern Energy case had the power to block most new Marcellus Shale drilling in the state. The case, revolving around the oil and gas “rule of capture” principle, was appealed by Southwestern all the way to the PA Supreme Court. We are elated to report that yesterday the Supremes ruled supreme and found in favor of Southwestern–retaining the rule of capture in the Keystone State. This is seriously good news for both drillers and leased landowners. Below we explain what the rule of capture is, the background of the case, and what the Supremes said in yesterday’s important ruling.
Yesterday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it has reached a settlement with Gulfport Energy over alleged air emissions violations found at 17 well pad locations Gulfport operates in the Ohio Utica. The violations happened in 2015. The settlement includes Gulfport paying $1.7 million in fines and spending another $2 million in “improvements” to cut down on volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions at the 17 well pads.
The $4.2 billion, 713-mile Rover Pipeline system that flows Marcellus/Utica natural gas from western PA and eastern OH all the way to Canada, placed the final two pieces of the system online in November 2018 (see 
We are sad to report that over 1,000 dedicated workers who used to work at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) oil refinery in Philly will permanently remain out of the jobs they once held at the facility. The owner of PES has decided to sell the now-closed refinery to a real estate developer from Chicago who intends to convert the property from a refinery (the nation’s oldest and largest refinery along the East Coast) into…warehouses. Yeah, warehouses. Complete with an increase in truck traffic, diesel fumes, and all sorts of headaches that come from a massive warehouse complex located in an urban area. It’s sad.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) and their monthly Drilling Productivity Report (DPR), the Marcellus/Utica region will produce 56 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) less of natural gas in the coming month of February than it will have produced in this month of January. That’s the second month in a row M-U gas production has dropped in the modern shale era. Last month’s DPR forecast a 74 MMcf/d drop for this month (see 
In a coordinated attack on Pennsylvania House Bill (HB) 1100, aimed at attracting NEW petrochemical investment to the state, Big Green has launched a letter-writing campaign to newspapers to try and shame PA Senate Republicans into voting against the state’s future economic and jobs bonanza. Fat chance Big Green!
The ticket to getting elected in uber-liberal southeastern Pennsylvania (in the Philadelphia suburbs) is to track left with your politics. Even the few elected Republicans in SEPA are nothing more than Democrat-lite in their philosophy and voting. Two Democrats who unseated PA House Republicans in Chester County in 2018 by running against the Mariner East pipeline project, are now being challenged because of their pipeline positions.
The sleaziest of Pennsylvania’s Big Green groups–THE Delaware Riverkeeper and PennFuture–have filed a “friend of the court” (amicus) brief in a federal lawsuit hoping they can help gut the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by denying FERC the only way the agency has of combating these sleazy groups–something called a tolling order.
Andrew Cuomo makes us puke. Literally. Cuomo, Governor of New York, became a dictator and stripped away the property rights of citizens living in NY in 2015 when he autocratically decided to prohibit shale fracking throughout the state (see