EQT Hires New COO for $1.1M – Tells Him to Cut Costs (Giggle)
EQT yesterday announced they’ve hired a new Chief Operating Officer–Gary E. Gould, hired away from Harold Hamm at Continental Resources where he oversaw production and resource development (essentially the same position). Gould is being paid $550,000 a year with a $500,000 signing bonus ($1.1 million total), for his first year. His salary goes up from there. Gould’s charter from EQT CEO Rob McNally? Cut costs. Which made us giggle.
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The Ohio Oil & Gas Association (OOGA) is currently holding their 72nd Annual Meeting in Columbus, Ohio. U.S. Vice President Mike Pence will address the event today. Cool! Kallanish Energy is at the event. They report that Encino Energy, which bought out all of Chesapeake Energy’s considerable Ohio Utica assets last year, was the “center of attention” yesterday.
We’ve been tracking the story of a coming $800 million LNG export plant that will be built in rural northeastern Pennsylvania (see 
Both Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) and Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) are facing an existential threat from the clown judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circus.
Russian native Boris Brevnov (former Enron executive) and his partner Charles Ryan (a Radnor native, once the chief country officer in Moscow for Deutsche Bank), are now one vote away from Philadelphia City Council approving a $60 million Marcellus LNG export facility, to be built on property owned by Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW).
In late December, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that so-called “stripper wells” can be taxed under the 2012 Act 13 law, slapped with an impact fee assessment if those wells produce more than 90 thousand cubic feet per day (Mcf/d) of gas in a single month, any month (see 
Our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, published a post yesterday on the topic of “U.S. natural gas processing plant capacity and throughput have increased in recent years.” In that post EIA links to a handy dandy online tool that lists all of the active natural gas processing plants operating in the U.S. We used the tool to download all of the plants in PA, OH and WV, and further trimmed out the low volume (conventional only) processing plants, leaving a list of sweet 16 Marcellus/Utica processing plants–where they are located and how much they process.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: PA Senate’s next job: consider confirmation of DEP, DCNR, Agriculture secretaries; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: South Dakota shows how to play offense against pipeline opponents; New Mexico bill proposes ending natural gas, coal for for power gen; NATIONAL: ‘Green New Deal’ would hit minorities the hardest; Nine projects receive $18 million to advance technology for natural gas vehicles; Biggest threat to once-prized gas is getting kicked out of homes; “60 Minutes” Softball (video).
Yesterday the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) granted a request to Kinder Morgan to “introduce feed gas, back-up fuel, and BOG fuel” to the first of what will be 10 production units at its Elba Island, Georgia LNG export facility. This is yet another step toward bringing the facility online.
We’ve just caught wind of a “new” pipeline project coming from National Fuel Gas Company (NFG) 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. It’s called the FM100 Project. Kind of sources like a radio station, no?
We spotted a write-up on a recent court decision coming from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in which a West Virginia landowner had a signed Marcellus lease requiring PetroEdge (later Statoil) to drill three wells on or under their property. And yet the courts have sided with the driller, essentially allowing the driller to wiggle out of the terms of the lease.
Eureka Resources owns and operates three centralized treatment/recycling facilities that process flowback/produced waters (i.e. wastewater) from the Marcellus Shale. Two of the facilities are located in Williamsport (Lycoming County), PA, and one in Standing Stone Township (Bradford County), PA, near Towanda. Eureka has just announced a joint venture to use high tech to recover lithium from the Marcellus wastewater they process. How cool is that?!
Williams is in the fight of its life to get New York State to approve its Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) project (see 
Thank God anti fossil fuelers are throwing in the towel in West Virginia–at least for this year–in their never-ending campaign to stop shale drilling in the state. A recent article appearing in the biased ProPublica and Charleston Gazette-Mail highlights antis’ frustration in not getting their bills to advance in this year’s legislative session–a session that is rapidly coming to a close.
Every year or two another fraudulent piece of “research” is released supposedly showing a connection between fracking and health issues. Last March Yale released a nonsense study that says fracking causes STDs (see