Range Resources 2Q – Production Up 10% Despite MarkWest Outage
Production for Range Resources was up a healthy 10% year over year in second quarter 2019, according to Range’s 2Q19 update issued late last week. Range produced 2.3 billion cubic feet equivalent per day (Bcfe/d) in 2Q. For the first half of the year Range brought online 39 Marcellus/Utica wells and plans to bring online another 49 wells in the second half of 2019. The company is on track to spend roughly $750 million on drilling in 2019.
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In March we told you about National Fuel Gas Company’s (NFG) FM100 Project in northwestern Pennsylvania that will beef up and extend an existing pipeline network to flow an extra 330 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of Marcellus gas to Williams’ mighty Transco Pipeline (see 
Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), headquartered in Newark, NJ, says it will shutter all but its three of its natural gas-fired electric plants by 2046, in a misguided effort to reduce “climate-warming emissions to net zero by 2050.” But they’ll do it *only* if the government adopts an economy-crushing, totally regressive “carbon tax” (to punish the use of natural gas). PSEG’s ultimate goal is to force their customers to use less electricity. That’s their big solution. Use less, and they’ll charge you more for what you still use. The end result of dumping gas-fired plants is predictable–grid unreliability and rolling blackouts.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Ohio agencies say they don’t get many fracking health complaints; Gulfport Energy Fund opens second grant round of 2019; Deep Well Services jump-starts funding campaign for Butler County Emergency Services Unit; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: U.S. approves commercial service for Sempra Louisiana Cameron LNG export plant; Saltwater disposal wells make up nearly one-third of new well permits; NATIONAL: More U.S. coal-fired power plants are decommissioning as retirements continue; Natural gas glut is crushing US drillers; A new U.S. oil production peak looks imminent; Congress considers carbon tax plans that will hurt poor; Shale oil & gas are hurricane-proofing U.S. energy markets; INTERNATIONAL: Gas is part of the solution in the planet’s energy transition, Goldman Sachs strategist says.
Yesterday the new EQT management team, in particular CEO Toby Rice, held a conference call with stock analysts to discuss the company’s second quarter financial and operational update. We learned a number of things from the call and materials published by EQT: A number of new faces have appeared in senior management; the company remains committed to sister company Equitrans and its Mountain Valley Pipeline project; and EQT’s second-quarter net income jumped more than 700% from a year ago–something previous CEO Rob McNally can take credit for.
We caught wind of something on the Tallgrass quarterly conference call yesterday that had previously eluded our otherwise reliable radar. Tallgrass, via its subsidiary BNN Water, bought out and merged in Central Environmental Services back in May. That’s important because Central is a “water services” provider in the Marcellus/Utica. Namely, Central (now BNN) operates three injection wells in Ohio. On yesterday’s Tallgrass conference call, company officials said they are working on a plan to build pipelines to those injection wells, saving a whole bunch of truck trips.
Steven Winberg, the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s assistant secretary for fossil energy, spoke to West Virginia lawmakers on Tuesday. His message? The Trump Administration is prioritizing building out a petrochemical industry in Appalachia. Among Winberg’s comments, on the matter of establishing an NGL storage hub in Appalachia, he said: “At DOE we have a full court press on this.” For those who don’t follow basketball, the term full court press means aggressive pressure against the opponent in the back court. Winberg’s meaning: DOE is doing everything it can to make the NGL storage hub project happen.
It’s hard to miss the stories in oil and gas (even national) media: Company after company, in particular oilfield services companies, are predicting a big slowdown in drilling during the second half of 2019. Over the past few days OFS companies including Schlumberger, Halliburton, Patterson-UTI, Superior Energy Services, Helmerich & Payne, and RPC have all predicted a coming decline (crash?) in drilling in the near future. What about the Marcellus/Utica region? Does the coming slowdown affect us too?
On Monday MDN brought you the news that Range Resources has sold a 2% overriding royalty interest on 350,000 acres “in southwest Appalachia” for $600 million (see 
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper has engaged in a months-long smear campaign to imply the shale industry in southwestern PA is guilty of causing a “cluster” of rare childhood cancers–even though there’s an old uranium dump in the same vicinity as those cancer clusters (see 
U.S. Senator from Mississippi John Wicker (Republican), and Congressman John Garimendi from wacko California (Democrat), have re-introduced a really bad bill euphemistically called Energizing American Shipbuilding Act. We’ve extensively covered the 1920 Jones Act that prevents any shipping from one U.S. port to another unless the ship is *built* and *owned* by Americans. The Jones Act prevents us from shipping homegrown LNG to any ports because there are not big LNG carries made here in the U.S. (see 
A sad end to the hope that Braskem, the largest petrochemical company in Latin America (headquartered in Brazil), is going to build an ethane cracker in Wood County, WV, near Parkersburg. We hasten to add Braskem leaving doesn’t mean someone else won’t will build a cracker plant there–it just won’t be Braskem. News is leaking that Braskem has put the land they had purchased for a possible cracker up for sale.
Yesterday MDN brought you the news of a newly passed Ohio law to prop up two bankrupt nuclear power plants and coal-fired plants (see