The citizens of Weirton, WV are rallying against a well pad proposed by SWN. It will be located on a 300 acre tract of land, which is awfully big, but it’s also awfully close to some retail shopping and other businesses, and close enough to some residential areas that I can understand their concern. See maps below.

The usual concerns my clients have expressed in the past have been about light and noise from the drilling rig, and dust and road damage from the trucks.

Those residential areas to the north and to the east of the Brownlee well pad will definitely be affected by the light, and even to some extent by the noise. Those drilling rigs make a lot of noise at times. The lights are the main complaint I’ve heard, though. When they’re drilling, the rig is like a high powered, all-white-light Christmas tree. The lights are so bright it can make it hard to sleep at night.

The good news is that there is quick access to the highway so the trucks won’t spend a lot of time on surface roads. I would want to know which roads they will be using, and make sure SWN keeps those truckers in control. One of the main complaints I hear is that truckers get too comfortable with their routes and start really flying along. It can be heart stopping when a big truck like that comes barreling past going the other way on a sharp curve, and barely staying in its lane.

SWN and other oil and gas companies must do a better job of working with their neighbors than they have previously. If the Atlantic Coast Pipeline had been a better neighbor it might have been able to complete its project, and definitely would have been a lot closer to its original deadlines. The days of the Wild, Wild, West in oil and gas drilling are gone. Oil and gas companies no longer get to bully landowners the way they used to, even though they still try to.

We really hope that SWN works with its neighbors in this case.

This edition of the State of Oil and Gas is a few days late. We apologize, with the explanation that we simply couldn’t get to it in time this month.

On September 15, natural gas prices were at $5.46/MMBtu, higher than they have been in seven years. Oil prices were at $72.61, a healthy price. Drilling rigs were at 503, the same level they were last month. They had bounced up to 508 and down to 497. We’d like to see this number going up a little. Storage levels were at 3,006 billion cubic feet, below last year’s level and the five year average.

The financial impact that oil and gas development has on the State of West Virginia is enormous.

West Virginia’s governor activated a dormant agency, the WV Public Energy Authority. This is new on our radar, so we’ll have to watch and see what happens with it.

A natural gas pipeline near Coolidge, Arizona, exploded, killing a dad and daughter, and leaving the mother with burns across half her body. The pipeline was over 50 years old. Based off what I’ve read over the years, it seems that pipelines start having random problems when they get that old. If you have an old pipeline near your house, you should do some investigating into the age, condition, and maintenance of it.

The price of natural gas just keeps going up, and Marcellus shale producers are benefitting.

Forbes has an excellent article about why LNG exports are increasing so much.

The Ohio cracker plant is on an indefinite hold. PTT Chemical is looking for a new partner before making a final investment decision. This is disappointing as an additional cracker plant would provide an additional and added-value use for all the natural gas produced from West Virginia. Anybody out there have a few billion dollars to invest?

Hurricane Ida shut down a lot of oil and natural gas production.

Natural gas production increased in the Marcellus shale area, thanks to new pipeline capacity.

OPEC+ decided to increase production of oil by 400,000 barrels per day, but that didn’t affect markets much.

Producers are moving back to drilling new wells instead of completing DUCs.

There’s a type of compressed natural gas vehicle that I hadn’t heard about, the near-zero emissions (NZE) natural gas vehicle (NGV). How new it is, I don’t know, but if it’s been around for a while it flew under the radar.

I’ve been saying this for years. West Virginia needs to process its natural gas before it gets sent out of state. Turn it into electricity, turn it into petrochemical feedstocks, separate and bottle propane, that kind of thing. It’s good to see someone else thinks so.

A week later, and most of the natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico is still offline.

Southwestern Energy requested permits to build a well pad within the city limits of Weirton. They were denied. It seems most everybody who showed up at the meeting opposed it. I’ve got no problem with the decision. Well pads are noisy and really light up the night sky during drilling. However, if those issues could be mitigated during the drilling period, a well pad is a quiet unassuming spot afterwards. Seems like the neighbors could get SWN to mitigate sound and light issues. This probably won’t be the last we see of this.

Natural gas prices are up over $5.00/MMBtu and seem likely to stay up there. I would never have predicted that last year. Nobody would have.

LNG demand is likely to keep growing.

US natural gas consumption is likely to decline in 2022, due to the increase in price, according the the EIA. This is exactly why drillers are right to not significantly increase the number of wells they drill. Increase, yes, but not a lot.

We’re a few days late getting this out. The following number are from April 15, 2021. The price of natural gas is at it’s high, $2.66/MMBtu, having gotten as low as $2.46/MMBtu; the rig count is at 432, up 30 from last month (cool it a bit, drillers); and natural gas in storage is 1,845 Bcf, right back at the five year average. It sure didn’t take long for gas storage levels to come back up to average.

Oil and gas producers are exercising restraint?! So are bankers?!?! This is a sign of the apocalypse.

There’s a bill in the WV House that will require a $2500 fee for modifying oil and gas well permits. This is good. The Office of Oil and Gas needs more money. Hopefully they’ll use it to hire more inspectors. UPDATE: It passed.

Governor Justice proposed eliminating the state income tax. Other sources of income will have to make up for it, and the severance tax (on minerals extracted from the ground) is one of them. You can imagine the oil and gas industry isn’t happy about it, and the coal industry is even less happy about it. As it’s proposed, I don’t see it actually increasing, as it’s a graduated tax, with a 5% tax on anything below $3.00 per MMBtu, and .5% increase on every $0.50 increase in price up to $9.00/MMBtu. The price will never get that high again under current natural gas industry conditions. In fact, it’s unlikely to get up to $4.00/MMBtu for any great length of time. This won’t help the State’s income, and it won’t affect most companies’ bottom line significantly.

One thing that has held up construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline has been some people sitting in trees on the pipeline right of way. A court ordered them to leave. They stayed. Police brought in a crane and removed them from the trees. Construction will now proceed.

I don’t usually bring up bills that have only been introduced, but this one’s an important one. There are regulatory bottlenecks that hold up LNG exports. This bill would remove those. This is important because the LNG is exported to many developing countries. They need this source of energy. It’s cheap and it’s cleaner than the alternatives. Even environmentalists should be supporting this because the realistic alternative is that if developing countries can’t get LNG they will buy coal and oil for their energy needs, not wind and solar. This bill needs to pass.

Libya is bringing more oil and gas infrastructure online. I wonder how long before OPEC+ starts to impose production cuts on them? They need the cash to rebuild a war torn state, and cutting them back now would just be mean. But Libya will have to join in the cuts eventually.

That horrible forced pooling bill that was proposed this legislative session is apparently dead, thank goodness.

Investors are expecting oil and gas companies to be more disciplined. That’s great news. As long as oil and gas companies could get all the money they wanted, we were always going to experience boom and bust cycles with correspondingly ridiculous fluctuations in energy prices. Discipline will lead to consistency, and this is one business owner really likes the idea of consistent business.

The Suez Canal is back open, and there are about 18 LNG ships waiting to get through. While this doesn’t directly affect U.S. markets, the change in shipping will temporarily change prices.

Pipelines out of Appalachia are running at or near capacity. When that happens, the pipelines raise their prices, in effect reducing the price that producers get for their product. This reduces your royalty check. When the Mountain Valley Pipeline finally gets built, it will help with this problem.

No new LNG projects are expected to be announced this year. At least, there won’t be any final investment decisions (FIDs). There can actually be a lot of money thrown a these high-dollar projects before the final go/no-go decision is made, which is why there are lots of “little” investment decisions, and then a “final” investment decision.

We saw a build in natural gas storage levels. This is earlier in the year than usual, which indicates that producers are aware that we have lower than normal levels of gas in storage and are producing enough gas to make up the difference.

The EIA crunched the numbers and we officially used 7% less energy last year. They are also saying that natural gas prices will average above $3.00/MMBtu during 3Q2021. That would be nice.

The WV Legislature has passed a bill that would change how oil and gas wells are taxed. It will be interesting to see if this increases production and development or not.

It’s been a month! Natural gas prices are at $2.51/MMBtu, and have fallen from a high of about $3.20/MMBtu over the course of the month. That high was affected by the powerful winter storm in Texas and the Midwest. Rig counts are at 402, up five from last month. That’s a reasonable increase. In fact, that might be a little lower than what we need. Gas in storage (1,793) is below the five year average (1,934), but has crept slightly closer to the average compared to last month.

It looks like EQT is bringing more development to West Virginia. We’ve been seeing more EQT leases in the western part of Marion County, and this article supports our anecdotal evidence that activity is picking up there.

Antero’s quarterly report paints a reasonably rosy picture, with production flat and demand growing. While it would be exciting to see increasing development activity, having flat activity is still good. It means that royalty prices will stay about the same or go up a bit, and there will still be leasing activity.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline has had some slippage issues in Lewis County, WV. It’s a good thing it’s not already in service or there could be some real fireworks.

Mexico hedges its produced oil price using financial tools called options. In the past it has bought options once a year. Now it is going to buy them throughout the year. This should actually reduce some of the volatility of the oil market, just a little.

Oil production is ramping back up.

An article over at Seeking Alpha does the math and makes a pretty strong argument that next winter we’re going to see really low natural gas storage levels. If that’s the case, prices will skyrocket. Keep an eye on rig counts and read the next quarterly reports when they come out.

The extreme cold at the end of February used a lot of natural gas.

The Mountaineer NGL Storage project let a permit lapse last fall. They’ve reapplied. Does that mean that the PTT Global cracker plant is back on? Or does the Mountaineer NGL storage project have another client they’ll store liquids for? We don’t know, but it’ll be interesting to see when the news comes out.

Here’s one opinion stating that it’s unlikely that we’ll see any more interstate pipeline projects like the Atlantic Coast, the Rover, and the Mountain Valley.

The Saudis decided to extend their 1 million barrel per day production cut, which means oil prices will stay high (you saw how gasoline prices went up a bit, right?) and U.S. producers will start ramping up production again.

There’s another forced pooling bill working its way through the West Virginia legislature. It’s a bad bill. It would not give a signing bonus to non-consenting owners, and the royalty is 12.5%. I guess cotenancy wasn’t good enough for the producers, now they are asking for more.

12 Western states are suing the Biden administration over the “fracking ban”, alleging that the administration doesn’t have authority to use “social cost” as a factor in deciding whether to allow fracking on public lands.

The EIA is predicting an increase in demand for energy in 2021 and 2022. I mean, unless there’s another global pandemic or some such, right? Population grows, demand for comfort grows, and energy is needed for those things. So it stands to reason that demand will grow. What will be interesting to see is how much renewable energy grows in the same time span. Interestingly, the EIA said in a different report that natural gas use was down in 2020 except for electric power generation.

Today, the price of natural gas is $1.84/MMBtu, and rig counts are still trending down.

The West Virginia legislature is looking at a couple bills that will affect oil and gas production and development.

China is going to be buying more natural gas from us over the next few years. This is going to help — a little — with natural gas prices. We can produce so much natural gas that it’s not going to make a big difference.

One fellow thinks that oil services companies are past the worst part of the downturn.

EQT’s stock has been downgraded — to junk!

LIbya is not producing oil right now (civil war, I feel for those folks), but the price of oil is actually going down. Fracking has made the U. S. much less dependent on foreign oil. Even just a few years ago, Libyan oil going off the market would have resulted in a strong bounce in oil prices.

The President is encouraging European nations to buy American LNG.

Two workers were injured on a well pad in Marshall County. The oil patch is dangerous.

Pennsylvania upheld the Rule of Capture in oil and gas law.

RBN Energy does a deep dive into natural gas prices and predicts (no surprise) that gas prices will remain down.

Seeking Alpha looked at Cabot’s numbers and it looks like Cabot can make money clear down to $2/MMBtu. That’s impressive.

Forbes is cautiously optimistic about the new oil and gas trade deal with China.

Seeking Alpha suggests that at least part of the reason production went up while drilling went down is that drillers were bringing DUCs online. That’s….actually a really good point.

NGI predicts sub-$2.00 gas for 2020, calls it Gasmageddon. Nice.

On the other hand, one writer over at Seeking Alpha thinks drilling has been going down long enough that we’ll start to see reduced production soon, and $3.00 gas with it.

We’re beginning to see hints that we’re at the bottom of the market. It’s probably going to stay here a while, particularly if the winter weather stays mild–which is likely. With rig counts down and demand only climbing slightly, we don’t expect to see any significant changes in the market until next fall. Natural gas prices will rebound back up over $2.00, and probably over $2.25, but they are unlikely to go higher than that for long.

Today, gas prices are at about $2.13/MMBtu, and they briefly dropped below $2.00/MMBtu during the last couple weeks.

Rig counts are at 781, which is down again. That’s going to reduce production eventually.

RBN Energy’s 2019 Prognostication Results and 2020 Prognostications.

Cameron LNG has started producing LNG from Train 2. More LNG going overseas!

Every year, Mexico hedges the price of natural gas, assuring the country that it can get gas at a specific price, making it easier for the country to budget for its energy needs. This year’s hedge (which will be effective for the rest of 2020) is at $49/bbl.

The EIA expects energy demand to grow 50% in the next 30 years. That’s an enormous amount of growth. Most of the growth will be in Asia.

Over the last six years, rig counts have dropped by 50% while oil production has increased by 60%.

One trader thinks natural gas prices are unlikely to move up significantly. I agree.

The 4th Circuit rejected a permit that the Atlantic Coast Pipeline needs.

Gas prices keep going down, but demand is going up. Up 20% in the last five years. That’s a trend that’s going to continue.

EQT is saying they’ll need more help from the West Virginia legislature in order to develop natural gas in West Virginia. They don’t. The solutions that EQT proposes are only in the interest of the companies and never good for oil and gas owners. The WV legislature really needs to think more about WV oil and gas owners.

The West Virginia legislature is working on an organization that would help secure investment money from China. Some of this money would hopefully get used to build the Appalachian Natural Gas Storage Hub.

If you’d like to know more about the international LNG market than you probably need to, then read RBN Energy’s series of posts about it.

Oil prices are becoming more stable, or perhaps it’s better to say less volatile, than they used to be. Stable is not a word to use in the same sentence with the term “oil prices”.

Natural gas production from the Marcellus/Utica region declined last month, and projected production is flat for the year. My gut says production will start to decline before the end of the year.

The price of natural gas today is about $2.69/MMBtu.

Oil and gas news has again been a bit slow. Mainly it’s more of the same.

EQT is cutting its capital expenditures for 2020, and even the last quarter of 2019. Cutting them a lot. This means less drilling and less taking of leases.

West Virginia tax revenues are below what was initially projected, in part because of a lack of demand for gas and in part because the pipeline construction (ACP and MVP) got shut down.

Rig counts continue to fall. At some point this means underproduction, but for the time being we have plenty of gas. The important fact to figure out is when the reduction in rigs will result in too little gas. Somebody who can figure that out accurately can make a lot of money in the stock market.

This Forbes article focuses on oil, but the economic forces are true for gas producers as well. Everybody is slowing drilling. Everybody is saying they will produce the same. Eventually they will have to increase drilling as wells simply run out of gas. When? Who knows.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline people think they’ll be building again in summer of 2020.

Disney Cruise Lines has ordered three LNG powered cruise ships. This will probably do more to reduce pollution than the Cash for Clunkers program did. Cruise ships are ridiculously dirty.

Cunningham Energy here in West Virginia is doing alright for itself. One of its well pads had produced (over its lifetime) 100,000 barrels of oil and 91 million cubic feet of wet gas. That doesn’t seem all that exciting until you realize that the wells they are drilling are about a tenth the cost of a Marcellus shale well. The ROI is pretty good.

A review of several weather sites says that 2019-2020 winter weather is expected to bring average temperatures or above average temperatures, but plenty of storms. Of course, there’s always a site or two that say it’s going to be colder than usual, and a site or two that say it’s going to be warmer than usual. Guess we’ll see, but it seems unlikely that we’ll have anything other than normal winter temperatures.

CNX is using e-fracking (using natural gas to power electric generators which provide the energy to push the fracking fluid into the formation), and went all e-fracking on a well pad in Green County, PA in May. It’s cheaper for the company, quieter by a lot, and produces fewer emissions.

Big news! Arsenal has filed for bankruptcy, again! They filed back in February of this year, zipped through the process in 10 days, and now are at it again. It seems this is more about restructuring debt than anything, as all the major investors are onboard.

It’s been a bit of a slow couple weeks for oil and gas news. When the most exciting thing to report is 3rd quarter earnings reports, you know it’s slow. Granted, you do get a rough idea of where the experts think the industry is going, but it’s just not…much.

Natural gas prices today are $2.60/MMBtu. They had gone over $2.70/MMBtu a day or two ago. It’s a bit of a surprise as gas storage has gone over the five year average, but I’ve stopped trying to predict the movements of the natural gas price. That way madness lies.

Prices for natural gas coming out of the Marcellus/Utica region have dropped farther than the price at the Henry Hub. It seems that’s primarily because of the TETCO pipeline exploding and being shut down, constricting the flow of gas from the Marcellus/Utica region to the Henry Hub, as well as the Cove Point LNG plant shutting down for maintenance.

Exxon-Mobile is looking for another site for a cracker plant. Seems like going to the Parkersburg, WV location that was already going to be used as a cracker plant is a no-brainer, but there must be some other factors that we’re not aware of driving the decision.

EnergyFuse.com summarizes the various oil production outages around the world and notes that fears of a global recession as well as lower demand have countered the usual upward movement in price these would cause.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline has been ordered to stop construction pending additional regulatory research into some endangered species.

A trash hauling company, Republic Services, is adding to its CNG fleet.

Not being a financier, I’m not sure whether Range selling another 0.5% overriding royalty (total of 3.5% sold to date) is a good thing or a bad thing. The article states that the cash will be used for share buyback, so maybe it’s a good thing. But selling off future income at (presumably) a significant discount seems awfully short-sighted.

Burning natural gas has saved consumers a huge amount of money over the last ten years.

Yet another company is being accused of underpaying royalties. I’m beginning to think that there are two kinds of royalty owners, those who have been underpaid and those who are being underpaid.

Every once in a while we’ll take a look at one of the quarterly reports from a company that’s active in West Virginia. This one is from Southwestern Energy, a/k/a SWN. While they’re geared towards investors, there can be interesting nuggets for royalty and mineral owners at times. In general, SWN is producing more, and using a lot less money. Spoiler: that’s true for all the other producers, too.

Also in regards to SWN, they do a pretty good job of taking care of the water they use.

The amount of LNG exports has doubled, again.

Antero is one of the more important oil and gas companies in West Virginia. Their 3rd quarter report sheds light on why they closed the water treatment plant and how they expect next year to go.

Natural gas prices are at $2.28/MMBtu today. They spent a couple good weeks up at about $2.50/MMBtu. It seems that we stored more gas than expected.

The third largest storage facility in North America (in Alberta, Canada) is at its lowest level in twenty years. That would typically drive prices up some, but it doesn’t seem to be doing so. Read the first of two articles about it over at RBN Energy.

Gas production is hitting new highs and setting new records. More interesting though are the last two paragraphs of the article which say that DUCs (Drilled but UnCompleted wells) have gone down a lot.

West Virginia’s DEP approved a coal-to-liquids plant that would combine natural gas and coal to create diesel, gasoline, and other fuels. It’s the first full sized coal-to-liquids plant in the United States. Importantly for West Virginia, it’s turning some of our natural gas into a more refined product, increasing its value before it’s sent out of state.

The US is producing more natural gas than it needs right now, and companies have been building facilities to ship it overseas. Unfortunately, it seems that “overseas” also has a lot of natural gas, and probably will for the near future. Thanks to horizontal fracking, the world of the near future is going to have plenty of natural gas. Good for consumers, not so good for your friendly neighborhood oil and gas attorney.

On that same line of thought, England uses a lot of American natural gas because they banned horizontal fracking a while back.

The attack on Saudi oil production affected their light crude the most. When the U.S. imposed a tariff on oil to China, that’s the same grade of oil that it affected. So now China is forced to buy U.S. oil with a tariff.

FERC has approved another LNG facility. It’s in Jacksonville, FL, and will send LNGs to the Caribbean. It’s kind of small compared to some of the others that have been built recently, but every little bit counts.

The oil and gas investment community has changed the way it thinks about price forecasting. The attacks on Saudi infrastructure have added an element of uncertainty to things. If Saudi infrastructure can be hit, anything else could be.

Trying to figure out how this oil and gas law business will do in the next couple years we’ve run across this handy page over at the Energy Information Agency. It says what we’ve been expecting, for the most part. It looks like natural gas prices are going to stay about the same for quite some time. We are unlikely to see prices above $3.00, or anything below $2.00 (at least for long). Production can outpace demand; the only thing slowing producers down will probably be a lack of capital. Hopefully we don’t have a new crop of investment bankers come in and decide they can make money in oil and gas because when oil and gas companies get money they drill and produce, driving supply up and prices down.

The National Review makes the argument that we can have either more fracking or more war.

West Virginia benefits from the taxes paid by natural gas producers. WVONGA put together a report showing how much property tax (not severance tax) was paid just by natural gas producers this year.

Some people would like to build an NGL storage facility on the Ohio River. The NETL has created a report supporting it.

India’s gas company, Petronet, has agreed in principle to invest $7.5 billion into Tellurian’s Driftwood LNG terminal in Louisiana. India plans to get 5 MM tons of LNG per year from the plant.

IHS Markit is predicting an average natural gas price below $2.00/MMBtu next year.

West Virginia is the seventh largest producer of natural gas in the US. This Rigzone article goes into some detail about what that means.

Here’s a news report including video footage of the new cracker plant going up in PA.

Japan is going to invest $10 billion into diversifying the source of its LNG. Presumably this means it will take more from the US.

Antero Resources puts a good chunk of change into upgrading and maintaining the small country roads it uses. Even so, there are places they’re not getting to. Good on ya, but lets get the rest taken care of, too.

Antero’s water treatment facility in Doddridge County has been closed. It seems low gas prices have made it a financial burden on the company.

And there’s yet another LNG plant being built in Louisiana. That makes three for anybody who’s not counting.

So it’s September 3, but it was Labor Day and the office was closed tight all weekend. Everybody enjoyed themselves and didn’t think about posting this on the 1st. We’re getting back into the swing of posting things so look forward to another in a couple weeks. Enjoy the wrap up of oil and gas news from the last month!

Libya’s Sharara oil field is back online. Add 300,000 barrels per day back into the equation. Until some rebel faction decides to take it back off again.

Oil demand has gone down for three fiscal quarters. This hasn’t happened since 2014. Oil prices were pretty bad at that point.

An ethane storage facility will start construction in the first quarter of 2020. That will go a long ways towards keeping some of the value of the natural gas that we produce in the area, even if it’s not actually in the state.

This Reuters article discusses the rising demand for natural gas and the falling price of the same. All driven by an amazing increase in production capability. While this is good for consumers, it’s bad for West Virginia mineral owners and your friendly neighborhood oil and gas lawyer.

SWN is taking its rig count in the Appalachian Basin from six to two.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline folks seem to be misunderstanding the definition of the word emergency. Also, they have put someone’s house at risk. Come on, guys. Get it together.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline was planning to get working again here in August or September. However, a federal judge vacated some permits that the pipeline needs in order to get to work. ACP plans to re-file the permits and hopes to get back to work sometime in the November to March tree-cutting window.

Some folks are sitting in trees on the MVP right of way, and they’ve been there for almost a year. We remember reading and posting briefly about them back then. Didn’t realize just how long they would stay there. It’s kind of impressive, really.

Russia is probably happy with oil at $40/bbl, Saudi Arabia probably wants it at $80. So long, OPEC+?

We’ve been wondering how Marcellus Shale drillers planned to stay in business if gas prices stayed as low as they currently are. EQT’s new CEO, Toby Rice, plans to use “combo development“, which is “large-scale, sequential, highly choreographed drilling and hydraulic fracturing.” The article is behind a paywall.

If you wanted to know more than you ever cared about moving propane to Mexico by train, here’s the article for you. And it’s only Part One.

EQT’s new CEO, Toby Rice (see above) did a town hall meeting in Bridgeport, WV on Monday, August 19,2019. He’s talking as if EQT will be a kinder, gentler company. While that’s all well and good coming from the CEO, it’s going to take a while for that attitude to trickle down through the bureaucracy. It’s the same principle that makes the federal government stay pretty much the same in spite of the changes in power between the Ds and the Rs. I’ll really believe EQT has changed when they start approving a gross proceeds clause in their leases without us having to get into a knock down, drag out fight over it every single time.

If you’d like to know some of the basics about where the gas that’s being produced here in West Virginia is going, this is the article for you.

If you’re wondering why natural gas prices are really low, it’s pretty simple. We produce more gas than we use.

CNX is one of two companies developing the Marcellus Shale in Monongalia County, WV. They have been hyper-focused on just filling out some units that they already hold most of the leases for. Looks like they might be slowing things down. Last week they laid of 50 people, and this week they’ve laid off another 20. Word is that they’re going to lay off about 1/3 of their employees; they’re at about 15% right now.

On a more positive note, shale oil companies have posted an actual profit for the first time that we know about.