Other Energy Stories of Interest: Mon, Mar 19, 2018
The “best of the rest”–stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading: Marcus Hook refinery fined $750K; it’s time to get an ethane cracker up and running somewhere in the northeast; Ohio’s DeWine says he’ll be kind to Ohio Utica if elected gov; pipeline build-out unplugs Marcellus constraints; Heinz opposes fracking to protect its own foreign investments; Ohio figures out how to reduce methane emissions without govt interference; electric vehicles are always five years away; natgas under assault in some states; and more!
Read More “Other Energy Stories of Interest: Mon, Mar 19, 2018”
Private equity firm EnerVest owns a lot of acreage and wells (most of them conventional) in the Marcellus/Utica region. In addition to investing in land and wells, EnerVest also has its own upstream (i.e. drilling) subsidiary, EV Energy Partners (EVEP), with operations and assets in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. EVEP is an MLP–a master limited partnership. While EVEP is joined at the hip with EnerVest, they are (on paper) two different companies. EnerVest has vast holdings and is in the top 25 oil & gas companies in the nation. Last July the Wall Street Journal ran a story that said EnerVest was worth nothing on paper (see 
Rex Energy, a driller focused mainly on the Marcellus/Utica (headquartered in State College, PA), announced earlier this week that it is selling some of its non-operated oil and gas assets in three Pennsylvania counties: Westmoreland, Centre and Clearfield. Which assets are not described. The buyer is: XPR Resources. The sale amount is $17.2 million. Rex has, in the past couple of years, had stiff challenges, at least on the financial front. It has swapped out old IOUs for new IOUs, converted debt (IOUs) into equity (shares of stock), sold off assets in other basins–a whole lotta stuff to keep on drilling (see our 
On Tuesday CNX Resources (formerly CONSOL Energy) held an investors day in Pittsburgh to disclose the company’s strategy for the next few years. CNX is one of the big players in the Marcellus/Utica. The company owns 531,000 net Marcellus acres and 652,000 net Utica acres, with some/much of that acreage the same (the Utica layer sits under the Marcellus layer). The company has only developed about 6% of its acreage so far. Not even on first base! CNX CEO Nicholas “Nick” DeIuliis had some big boasts at Tuesday’s event. DeIuliis said CNX’s stacked pay (layer over layer) acreage gives it a leg up and makes the company “a disruptor” in the region. He also said this, with respect to the company’s acreage position: “We’ve got the biggest, baddest sandbox in the Appalachian region.” Indeed! Below is a summary of the event, along with the PowerPoint presentation used at the event (loaded with great information)…
There’s a number of threads to the ongoing saga of Constitution Pipeline, a $683 million, 124-mile pipeline from Susquehanna County, PA to Schoharie County, NY to move Marcellus gas into New York State and from there, into New England. The Andrew Cuomo-corrupted NY Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) refused to grant the pipeline necessary federal stream crossing permits, blocking construction, in April 2016 (see 
In some places, drillers have to fight tooth and nail, every inch of the way, just to drill a simple Marcellus Shale well. Such is the case in Upper Burrell (Westmoreland County), PA. Huntley & Huntley has plans to drill four shale wells in Upper Burrell Township. Sure there’s been push-back, but we thought the corner had been turned when town supervisors voted last November to approve H&H’s plans (see 
Anti-fossil fuel nutters have been on a holy mission to stop a 3.5-mile, 8-inch pipeline from being installed under the Potomac River (see 
Last week MDN told you about two radical anti-fossil fuel activists who built tree houses in the Jefferson National Forest and are living in them (for now) in an attempt to prevent the trees and the trees around them from being cut to make way for the legally permitted Mountain Valley Pipeline (see 
Fairmount Santrol, an Ohio-based sand producer that sells sand as a proppant for use in Utica and Marcellus Shale drilling, recently released its fourth quarter and full year 2017 update. Sand is good in Buckeye State. Fairmount reports the company sold 43.8% more sand in 2017 than in 2016–a sure sign that drilling in the Marcellus/Utica spiked up in 2017. Fairmount made $53.6 million in 2017, versus loosing $140.2 million in 2016, which is another positive sign. According to CEO Jennifer Deckard, “Proppant demand remained robust during the fourth quarter.” This may be the last quarterly update we bring you from Fairmount. As you may recall, late last year the company announced it is selling itself to Unimin, a subsidiary of Belgium-based SCR-Sibelco (see 
We’re not quite sure what to make of this story. North Carolina has been, as we’ve long pointed out, nitpicking in an attempt to slow down (or stop) the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) from traversing the state (see 
In January MDN brought you the sad news that the Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES), which operates the East Coast’s largest refinery on the banks of the Delaware River, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (see