EIA Aug ’19 Drilling Report: M-U Hits New High of 32.6 Bcf/d
Have you noticed the disconnect? While many in the press observe shale companies have lost an alarming amount of value–many over 90% of market capitalization in recent years–yet shale drillers are still in business and producing more oil and gas than ever. Record amounts, in fact. According to the EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration, our favorite government agency), in the coming month of September, the U.S.’s seven major shale plays will produce a combined 81.6 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of natural gas, and 8.8 million barrels of oil per day. That’s a brand new record high for each.
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In Lansing, NY, just outside of Planet Ithaca in Tompkins County, the local utility (NYSEG) wanted to build a short pipeline in 2017 to supply new customers with natural gas, but was blocked by crazies who irrationally hate fossil fuels (see 
Score a (very) minor victory for THE Delaware Riverkeeper, Maya van Rossum, in her holy mission to block a new fully authorized and permitted LNG export loading facility due to get built on the New Jersey bank of her beloved Delaware River (she thinks she owns the river and “speaks” for it). Riverkeeper filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for information about a facility New Fortress Energy is planning for a former DuPont dynamite factory site in NJ.
MPLX, formerly known as MarkWest Energy, recently released their second quarter 2019 update. There seems to be a new emphasis for MPLX on the Texas Permian play, which is detectable in the update. However, much of the company’s revenue continues to come from our region. A slide embedded deep in the Appendix of the latest slide deck tells an interesting story for us: Of the ten processing and fractionation plants MPLX is currently building or planning to build, six of them are in the Marcellus/Utica region. We have the list below.
Contrary to the media (and Big Green) narrative that environmentalists are some poor, lowly disadvantaged groups of righteous freedom fighters just trying to survive against gargantuan Big Oil companies to protect the planet, the opposite is true. Green groups are some of the most rich non-profit organizations in the U.S. (indeed, on the planet). They are controlled/funded by super-rich leftists whose goal is to twist the U.S. into a socialist state. We ran across an article, and a document, listing just how rich groups like the odious Sierra Club, NRDC, EDF and others really are. The numbers are staggering. Their revenue numbers are bigger than some oil companies!
Are oil (and gas) drillers on a precipice, about ready to go over the edge into oblivion? Become extinct? According to the article below, yes they are. The author is not necessarily rooting for that outcome, but simply recognizing that with market capitalizations in the toilet (down 90% or more), and the price of oil remaining low, many companies will not be in business in the next few years. That’s his thesis. Is he right?
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Gulfport Energy appoints Quentin R. Hicks Executive VP & CFO; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Natural gas merely a ‘byproduct’ for producers in US shale oil plays…Northern CFO; Ordinance aims to phase out natural gas appliances in San Luis Obispo; NATIONAL: EIA uses the heat content of fossil fuels to compare and aggregate energy sources; China continues to rob U.S. blind; Is the left beginning to abandon renewable energy?; INTERNATIONAL: Australia is on track to become world’s largest LNG exporter; The Nord Stream 2 pipeline and the dangers of moving too rashly toward renewable energy.
Once again the New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC), a corrupt political tool in the hands of an autocratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, has issued a denial of a federal Clean Water Act Section 401 water crossing permit for the National Fuel Gas Company’s Northern Access Pipeline project. Fortunately, DEC’s rejection doesn’t mean a hill of beans since the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) overruled the DEC last year.
In April President Trump signed an Executive Order (EO) instructing the Environmental Protection Agency to review Section 401 of the Clean Water Act–the section that grants states (and tribes) the right to have a say in pipeline projects (see 
Some interesting comments by Jim Crews, vice president of northeast business development for MPLX (formerly known as MarkWest Energy), during a presentation he gave at the Independent Oil and Gas Association of West Virginia’s (IOGAWV) Summer Meeting last week. Crews said lack of natural gas liquids storage is a crisis (our words, reflecting his sentiment). And we need storage not only here in the Marcellus/Utica region–but across the country. “We’re out of storage,” he said, and “Cargoes are just being given away.”
Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, is a vicious politician. He operates much like a mafia boss. Case in point: Cuomo refuses to allow a new pipeline to be built to the New York City (and Long Island) region, called the Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) project (see 