Nine Energy Service Launches $160M IPO
Nine Energy Service, an oilfield services company that competes with companies like Halliburton and Baker Hughes, operates in a number of shale basins, including the Marcellus/Utica. Nine was formed in 2014 by the combination of four existing oilfield services companies–Northern States Completions, Tripoint LLC, CDK Perforating and Integrated Production Services Canada. All four were portfolio companies of SCF Partners–a private equity firm investing in the oil and gas industry. The new company was named Nine Energy Service and is headquartered in Houston, TX. Why the unusual name of “Nine”? It’s aspirational. On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being perfect, they aspire to be a 9, which is about as good as you can get. Hence the name, which is kind of cool. Nine announced yesterday it plans to go public with an initial public offering of 7 million shares. The company hopes to raise ~$160 million with the IPO…
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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is clinically insane. It’s time to put him in a straitjacket and prevent him from doing any more damage to a once-great city. de Blasio is using city resources to sue five oil companies, blaming them for “climate change”–the hoax that mankind is causing the earth to warm at an apocalyptic rate. The theory behind global warming is that burning fossil fuels (extracted by the five companies) releases carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere where the CO2 then acts like a canopy over the earth, trapping in heat from the sun, causing the earth to warm. And, as the theory goes, Mom Earth is warming up to such a degree that it will “soon” (any year now) kill plants, animals, mankind–all living things. All sorts of ills are laid at the feet of so-called global warming, now called “climate change”, including earthquakes, major storms, hurricanes, pestilence, racism. No, we’re not exaggerating. EVERYTHING is blamed on global warming. Even the record cold temperatures that we’ve experienced in the northeast are blamed on global warming! Wait–how can that be? How can a canopy effect trapping heat cause COLDER temps? Obviously it can’t–but these people will believe anything. Yes, CLINICALLY INSANE. But maybe not totally insane, because at its root, de Blasio’s move is not *really* about global warming and preserving the planet–it’s about an avowed socialist (de Blasio admits his perverse political leanings) attempting to steal money from those who earn it, in order to redistribute it to people who don’t earn it–people who will keep voting de Blasio into office in response to his political bribery. de Blasio has also instructed the city to divest its pension funds from any company that remotely has anything to do with fossil fuels. Now that IS insane!…
The “best of the rest”–stories that caught MDN’s eye over the break that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: Gas operation job fair in Zanesville Jan 18; Blair County using $80K of Marcellus money to preserve farmland; Norfolk delays decision (again) on Atlantic Coast Pipe request to run under reservoir; LNG exports expected to increase by 1 Bcf/d in 2018; Baker Hughes had a bad year in 2017; trips of LNG going through Panama Canal spike up; and more!
CNX Resources, the gas drilling part of what used to be CONSOL Energy (but now is it’s own separate company), issued guidance yesterday for how much money they intend to spend on drilling in 2018. CNX will spend somewhere between $790-$880 million on drilling and midstream projects this year, with 65% of that total going for Marcellus projects, and 35% for Utica projects. That high level number breaks down as $515-$580 million for drilling and completions, and $275-$300 million for water, land and midstream infrastructure. CNX expects to drill 75 wells, 60 of them in the Marcellus, in PA and WV, and 15 in the Utica, in PA and OH. CNX plans to frack 51 wells this year, mostly in PA, and bring 59 wells online to production, again mostly in PA. The company also provided a big tease by saying it will spend $75-$100 million on running water pipelines “for two major stacked pay project areas that the company expects to be ready in the fourth quarter of 2019.” Hmmm. Wonder where they intend to expand in 2019? No CNX’s tease will stoke the rumor mill. As part of yesterday’s announcement, CNX also provided impressive data on a pair of dry Utica wells they recently drilled in Westmoreland County, PA…
We now have confirmation from the Russians themselves that the natural gas shipment on its way to Boston we alerted you to a few days ago is, indeed, Russian gas from the Yamal LNG plant, located in the Russian Arctic (see 
Pennsylvania State Rep. Brian Ellis (Republican from Butler County) introduced House Bill (HB) 1960 on Jan. 5. The bill, known as the “State Agency Regulatory Compliance Officer Act,” would create a new Regulatory Compliance Officer position in each state agency, including the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). The new Compliance Officer would have the authority “to block an agency from imposing fines and penalties for violations and to rewrite the policies under which fines and penalties are imposed.” The aim of the bill is to force all PA state agencies (including the DEP) to work *with* the people and companies they regulate. It would create a different mindset–instead of “gotcha” enforcement of regulations, it’s aimed at making it easy to comply with regulations. The bill states this in its opening lines: “(1) It is the purpose of this act for agencies to work collaboratively with, instead of acting punitively towards, regulated communities. (2) Agencies should strive to make the regulations which the agencies administer and enforce as clear and easily navigable as possible for regulated communities. (3) In administering a regulation, an agency’s primary goal should be to ensure compliance rather than to exact punishment.” Those who love Big Government don’t like this bill. Will this bill go anywhere? Who knows! What the bill indicates to us is that at least some legislators (Republicans) in Harrisburg are listening and “get it.” What do they get? That PA has developed a reputation for burdensome regulations and if the state wants the Marcellus miracle to continue, and grow, things need to change at the DEP. A $83.7 billion investment by China in neighboring WV’s shale/petrochemical industries should be a bright, red slap across every PA legislator’s face. Wake up! If you don’t fix the DEP, quickly, you’ll lose PA’s Marcellus momentum to someone else…
Last week MDN reported the news that the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) has suspended all construction work on the Mariner East 2 Pipeline (ME2) project until further notice (see 
We don’t know how many times we have to keep ringing the bell–this is a five-alarm situation! Wake up! A group of Democrats elected to the Jessup, PA Borough Council (Scranton suburb) are actively trying to block the completion of the state’s largest natural gas-fired electric generating plant–the first phase of which will be ready to go online in a little over a month. A bunch of ninny nanny antis didn’t like that they couldn’t stop the project, so they used money and help from Big Green groups last November to launch successful campaigns to defeat incumbent Council members who voted to authorize the Lackawanna Energy Center to be built by Invenergy (see 
Pennsylvania legislators (Democrats and RINOs) who were banking on the federal government to “fix” the problem of the free market are panicking after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected DOE Sec. Rick Perry’s so-called Grid Resiliency Pricing Rule that would tip the scales in favor coal and nuclear energy, keeping unprofitable electric generators in business longer (see 
One of the loudest, most persistent arguments by Democrats (and RINOs) in Pennsylvania in favor of a severance tax is that the existing impact fee (actually, better called an impact “tax”) have decreased over time because of a decrease in the number of new wells drilled due to the downturn in the market. There are two gigantic problems with their argument: (1) the impact tax has turned around, and is rising again (see 
On September 29, U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry sent a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) directing the agency to complete action on a “Grid Resiliency Pricing Rule”–ostensibly within 60 days. The proposed rule Perry proffered, sometimes referred to as the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR), would put in place regulations that favor electric generating plants powered by coal and nuclear. That is, it would allow unprofitable ventures to pass along new costs, making them profitable–in the name of protecting the electric grid. The theory Perry (and by extension President Trump) subscribe to is that if the free market drives out coal and nuke plants, the electric grid would be “vulnerable” to far fewer sources to power it. If coal and nukes are all but gone, and all of sudden there’s a natural gas shortage, or prices spike for natural gas, it would endanger the electric supply in this country. On one side of the argument are those who believe the free market sometimes needs a helping hand (via regulation), and on the other those who believe the free market will sort it all out and we are not vulnerable. The incoming/new chairman of FERC, Kevin McIntyre, asked for an extension so he and another new FERC member could take a little time to do a proper review (see 
In September, MDN told you that the obsequious members of the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) had slavishly obeyed their radical environmental masters by voting to move forward with a permanent ban on fracking in the Delaware River Basin (see 