Last week Cabot Oil & Gas issued its third quarter update. The official announcement was long on the financials and very short on details for their ongoing Marcellus Shale program in Susquehanna County, PA. We’ve lifted the relevant (short) section below. However, the company also held the ubiquitous analyst phone call and in that phone call (transcript below), we get a lot more detail about Cabot’s Marcellus program. One gem: the company is now producing 1.8 to 2.0 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas in the Marcellus. Cabot will be the first company to be officially inducted into the record-breaking 2 Bcf/d Club! Although the company plans to drill 180-190 new wells in 2015, only about half of those wells will be in the Marcellus. Alas, another shale play is now turning the head of Cabot…
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Southwestern Energy released their third quarter financial and operational update late last week. Picking through the release we find that their Marcellus gas production is up 47% from a year ago this time. At the end of September, the company had 234 operating Marcellus wells in production, and another 102 wells in various stages of being drilled. The vast majority of Southwestern’s wells are in Susquehanna and Bradford counties (PA), with a fair number also in Lycoming County, PA. Southwestern says they continue to test “the Upper Marcellus” and have drilled three such wells to date. Perhaps the biggest news (for New Yorkers) is this statement: “Two wells have also been drilled near the New York border in Susquehanna County. Early results are positive and work has begun to build a gathering system for future development in this area.” You can’t tell us there isn’t a boatload of gas sitting right across the border in the Empire State–if only the man-child Andrew Cuomo would make up his mind to allow drilling…
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CONSOL Energy continues its transformation from coal company to oil and gas company. In fact, it’s nearly complete. On a conference call yesterday discussing the company’s stellar performance in the Marcellus and Utica Shale, CONSOL officials hinted that they will soon split the company, putting the coal operation into its own master limited partnership (MLP). Meanwhile, also on the same call, CONSOL CEO Nick Deluliis said any day now the company’s production volume will blow on by the 1 billion cubic feet per day mark. Welcome to the 1 Bcf/d club!…
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Noble Energy released their third quarter numbers and operational update yesterday. The company operates in several U.S. shale basins as well as the Gulf of Mexico and several foreign locations. Of note is their ongoing program in the Marcellus Shale. Production for Noble from the Marcellus is up 31% from 2Q14 and up a big 95% year over year in 3Q14. They drilled 23 Marcellus wells during 3Q14 and brought 23 wells online during the quarter as well. Here’s the low down on Noble’s Marcellus program over the last three months:
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We’re outraged at the outrage of hypocritical anti-drillers. An article from Massachusetts begins this way: “Gas pipeline opponents throughout the state of Massachusetts are outraged about a new pipeline support coalition that has formed because the group not only has ties to the company trying to put the pipeline in place, but is also putting big businesses before residential concerns.” That set us off! Here’s what we’re outraged about…
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The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading:
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There’s a reason Philadelphia has the reputation of being one of the most corrupt cities in America–because it is. We have proof. Back in March of this year, after a long, hard process, the Democrat Mayor of Philly, Michael Nutter, announced a deal to sell the municipally-owned (and bleeding money) Philadelphia Gas Works to UIL Holdings Corporation, a Connecticut-based investor-owned gas and electric utility holding company (see Phila. Gas Works Deal for $1.86B – Marcellus/Utica One of Keys). The deal would have injected $424 million into the city’s failing pension fund. It was a win/win all the way around. What did the corrupt City Council do? Diddle around, giving special interests time to mount opposition (see Philly City Council Continues to Diddle Around on PGW Sale). Yesterday the corrupt City Council announced they were killing the deal Nutter, one of their own, worked so hard to negotiate…
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There was an explosion at an Eclipse Resources drilling site in Guernsey County, OH late last Friday night. One worker was reportedly hurt and taken by helicopter to the burn unit at the Akron Children’s Hospital. There are virtually no news accounts (so far) about the accident, and Eclipse has not yet posted anything on their website about the accident. Here’s the very brief (and only) account we can find, thus far:
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Prior to 2012, Brooke County, WV produced zero natural gas. Nada. Zippo. Nothing. In 2012 the county produced 1.4 million cubic feet (Mmcf) of natural gas. Barely a blip. In 2013, Brooke County produced 8 BILLION cubic feet of natural gas. The trajectory for the county, and other counties in the northern panhandle of WV is startling–thanks to the Marcellus and now the Utica Shale. Brooke is not the only eye-popping example in WV…
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Can Antero Resources do it again? A little over a year ago, in October 2013, Antero, one of the biggest players in the Marcellus/Utica Shale, floated an initial public offering (IPO) for the company, called “taking it public” because shares of stock will be owned and traded on a public stock exchange–and raised an incredible $1.57 billion (see Antero’s IPO Fetches $1.57B, Company Valued at $11B!). Antero is hoping lightening will strike twice, and indeed it may. Yesterday the company announced that it will spin off its midstream division into a new wholly-owned subsidiary, under a master limited partnership (MLP) structure, and offer “units” (think shares of stock) that will be publicly traded. The company plans to offer more than 43 million units to investors and if it gets the target $19-$21 per unit, the grand total will once again exceed $1 billion of new investment…
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A man with a long history of projects and companies dealing in LNG (liquefied natural gas) and CNG (compressed natural gas), Robert E. Petsinger, has announced he’s putting together financing for a $440 million company that will (a) build a regional LNG production plant along the banks of the Ohio River somewhere near Pittsburgh, and (b) build 50 LNG and LNG-derived compressed natural gas stations within a 500-mile radius of Pittsburgh. The reason for the location? To use cheap, abundant, locally mined Marcellus Shale gas. Given Petsinger’s history, this is no blue flame pipe dream. You can take it to the bank…
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Texas Gas Transmission owns an extensive natural gas pipeline system with about 6,100 miles of pipelines. Some 690 miles of that system runs from the Gulf Coast in Louisiana all the way to southwest Ohio (see map below). Earlier this month, Texas Gas, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Boardwalk Pipeline Partners, filed a request with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to reverse the flow on their 690-mile segment and begin to carry Marcellus and Utica Shale gas from the northeast to the south. Actually, what they want to do is turn the pipeline into a bi-directional flow–so the gas can go either way. The project is called the Ohio-Louisiana Access Project and no new pipeline is needed–just modifications of yard and station piping at four existing compressor stations along with building one new compressor station (project cost of $115 million). Here’s the details…
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Yesterday MDN ran what we thought was a stellar analysis between two sets of wells drilled by Eclipse Resources in the Ohio Utica Shale (see Eclipse Numbers: Dry Gas vs Wet Gas in Utica – Which One Wins?). In addition to details for those two sets of wells, Eclipse also released (yesterday) a brief summary of third quarter production numbers. The numbers, compared to the biggies in the Marcellus/Utica like Cabot and Range, are small. But definitely trending in the right direction. Production for Eclipse is up 104% from previous 2Q14 levels–an average 85.8 million cubic feet equivalent per day. The production mix during 3Q14 was 78% natural gas, 9% natural gas liquids and 13% oil…
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An important milestone has been achieved on the way to building the $5 billion Atlantic Coast Pipeline–a project that will run from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina (see Dominion Commits to Major New Marcellus/Utica Pipeline Project). The important milestone that just happened is the approval of North Carolina regulators that will allow Duke Energy and Piedmont Natural Gas to make contracts between their utilities and commercial divisions for gas transportation on the proposed pipeline. That is, by unanimous vote, the regulators just gave these companies permission to do business with themselves. Let us explain…
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Last week MDN told you that both Massachusetts U.S Senators–Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren–have turned against Kinder Morgan and their planned expansion of the Tennessee Gas Pipeline across the state (see Both Mass. Senators Oppose TGP Northeast Energy Direct Pipeline). Both Senators are, unsurprisingly, Democrats. So it was with some surprise that we noticed a schism among the Democrats on the pipeline. The Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) is calling comments by Markey and Warren to FERC “a vulgar attempt to politicize our nation’s energy regulatory agencies.” Them’s fightin’ words–especially coming from a normally Democrat stronghold (a labor union). Here’s some even stronger words from LIUNA…
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Below are upcoming events for this week and next. To see the full list of future events, visit this page: http://marcellusdrilling.com/calendar/.
NOTE: To have an item included, please email it to: calendar@marcellusdrilling.com.
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