Shale Gas News – September 8, 2018

Bill desRosiers
External Affairs Coordinator, Cabot Oil & Gas

 

The Shale Gas News, heard every Saturday at 10 AM on 94.3 FM, 1510 AM and Sundays on YesFM, talked about DEP production report, steel tariffs, natural gas liquids and much more last week.

The Shale Gas News has grown again; welcome Gem 104 as our FOURTH station! Gem 104 helps to solidify the Shale Gas News coverage in an important Marcellus region, PA’s northern tier. The Shale Gas News is now broadcasting in Bradford, Lackawanna, Lancaster, Lebanon, Luzerne, Lycoming, Pike, Sullivan, Susquehanna, Tioga and Wayne Counties, as well as in greater central PA. The Shale Gas News is aired on Saturday or Sunday depending on the station.

Every Saturday Rusty Fender and I host a morning radio show to discuss all things natural gas. This week, as guests, we had Mike Atchie, public outreach manager for Williams Partners and Matthew Austin, President & CEO of Holcome Energy, Eastern Freight and recently obtained OSO Wash.

This week we introduced a new segment Cabot Oil and Gas recently launched called Looking Back, Moving Forward. This video series, found on Cabot’s YouTube channel, is about Cabot’s ten year anniversary in the Marcellus shale and will sit down with your neighbors, landowners and local leaders all across Northeast PA to ask for their real opinions on what the oil and natural gas industry has meant to our region. This week Adam Diaz of Diaz Companies sat down with Cabot. You can see and hear the rest of Adam Diaz’s video series here.

The Shale Gas News, typically, is broadcast live. On the September 8th show (click above), we covered the following new territory (see news excerpts below):

• DEP report: State had record year for natural gas production in 2017. Pennsylvania had a record year for natural gas production in 2017, making it the second-largest producer of natural gas in the United States, the state Department of Environmental Protection said on Friday.  Unconventional well operators produced 5.36 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in 2017 — about a quarter-trillion more than in 2016, according to the DEP’s 2017 Oil & Gas Annual Report .
• Contradictory New York Times ‘Shale Bubble’ Op-Ed Based on Outdated Data. A recent New York Times op-ed suggests the United States’ newfound energy abundance will be short-lived based on the notion that surging tight oil development is not economically sustainable. Penned by Bethany McLean, author of the soon-to-be-released book “Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It’s Changing the World,” the piece’s hyperbolic headlines claim that, “The Next Financial Crisis Lurks Underground” and that “Fueled by debt and years of easy credit, America’s energy boom is on shaky footing.”
• Diversified Zags, Finds Profit in Appalachian Conventional Wells. We’ve shared the following story a few times over the years: In 2012 MDN editor Jim Willis took a tour of several Cabot Oil & Gas well sites in Susquehanna County, PA. One of the sites was a completed well pad with four producing wells, located not far from Carter Road in Dimock (the infamous Carter Road memorialized in Gasland). As we stood on the pad, Jim’s tour guide, Bill desRosiers, made this statement: “Cabot has over 4,000 vertical gas wells in West Virginia. You see these four horizontal wells? These four wells produce more natural gas in one day than all 4,000 of those vertical wells in West Virginia.”
• Shell Ethane Cracker Gets Reprieve from Trump Steel Quotas. RINO Pat Toomey can rest easy–there will be no delays in building the $6 billion Shell ethane cracker near Pittsburgh. The Trump Administration previously slapped a 25% tariff (i.e. tax) AND quotas on imported steel coming from countries dumping steel in our markets, driving out our own steel industry. Last week Trump lifted the quota from steel coming from certain countries, including Brazil. Shell is getting steel they need for the cracker from Brazil. Indeed, Shell’s Brazilian steel is already sitting in a U.S. port, undelivered due to the quota (a limit on how much can be imported).
• Southwestern Sells Fayetteville Shale, Now Focused 100% on M-U. Some exciting news to share. Southwestern Energy, headquartered in Texas, has cut a deal to sell all of their Fayetteville Shale (Arkansas) assets to Flywheel Energy for $1.865 billion in cash. The sale makes Southwestern a pure play, 100% focused driller on the Marcellus/Utica region (i.e. Appalachia). What will Southwestern do with an extra $1.865 billion? According to their announcement: (1) Spend $900 million of it on retiring IOUs (“notes”) previously issued. That is, debt retirement. (2) Buy back up to $200 million in outstanding shares of stock.
• EQT People: Who Stays with Mom & Who Goes with Dad After Co Split. t’s an amicable divorce, the split of EQT into upstream (drilling) and midstream (pipelines). But it’s still a divorce, and the parents have to decide which kids will go or stay with which company. The “kids” in this case are the top managers, the executives. And we have the list. After EQT announced its plan to buy/merge in Rice Energy last year, the company got pushback from a couple of so-called activist investors (i.e. corporate raiders). One raider, Jana Partners, tried its best to stop the EQT/Rice deal outright.
• How MarkWest Gets Marcellus/Utica NGLs to Market. The Marcellus and Utica Shale layers in Southwestern Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia and eastern Ohio produce a boatload of NGLs–natural gas liquids. One company had the foresight to plan a strategy to separate, transport and sell those NGLs. That company was MarkWest Energy, now known as MPLX following a purchase by/merger into Marathon Petroleum. MarkWest’s plan is firing on all cylinders.

The Shale Gas News sponsored by Linde Corporation

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