Shale Directories Conferences
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Utica Green Upstream & Midstream Conference
March 25, 2022
Pro Football Hall of Fame
Canton, OH
SPRING 2022 Hydrogen & Carbon Capture Conference
April 21, 2022
Stay Tuned for Registration Details COMING SOON!
Hilton Garden Inn, Southpointe
Canonsburg, PA
Latest facts and a rumor from the Marcellus, Utica, and Permian, Eagle Ford Plays
Chesapeake Does the Deal. Chesapeake Energy Corp. announced Tuesday it had reached a $2.6 billion cash and stock deal to acquire Dallas-based Chief E&D Holdings and associated assets in the prolific Marcellus shale gas basin of Pennsylvania.
The Oklahoma City-based company also said it would be selling assets in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin to Continental Resources for $450 million.
The company signed definitive agreements to acquire Chief E&D Holdings, LP and associated non-operated interests held by affiliates of Tug Hill, Inc., for $2.0 billion in cash and approximately 9.44 million common shares. Chief and Tug Hill hold high quality producing assets and an inventory of premium drilling locations in the Marcellus Shale in Northeast Pennsylvania. The cash portion of the transaction will be financed with cash on hand and the use of the company’s revolving credit facility. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, including certain regulatory approvals, is expected to close by the end of the first quarter of 2022.
“We know the importance of scale and the Chief and Tug Hill assets fit like a glove with our existing position in the northeast Marcellus Shale,” said Nick Dell’Osso, Chesapeake’s President and Chief Executive Officer.
“The acquisition checks all the boxes: it lengthens our premium inventory, further focuses our capital allocation, provides operational efficiencies, is accretive to free cash flow per share, allows us to grow our base dividend, preserves our balance sheet strength and improves our GHG emissions metrics.”
Chesapeake Energy Names Finance Head Nick Dell’Osso as Next CEO
Dello’Osso said upon closing, Chesapeake will benefit from a high-quality portfolio in three premier U.S. hydrocarbon basins—the Marcellus, Haynesville and Eagle Ford.
Under the terms of the Chief and Tug Hill agreements, which were unanimously approved by Chesapeake’s Board of Directors and also approved by Chief and Tug Hill, Chesapeake will acquire approximately 113,000 net Marcellus acres (>90% held by production). Assuming an April 1, 2022 closing date, the asset is currently projected to produce approximately 835 million cubic feet of net gas per day for nine months in 2022 and generate about $500 million in 2022 projected adjusted EBITDAX (including acquired hedges) at current commodity strip prices.
Upon closing of the transactions, Chesapeake plans to operate two rigs on the acquired properties during 2022, resulting in a total of 9 – 11 gas-focused rigs and 2 – 3 oil-focused rigs. The company will maintain a disciplined capital reinvestment strategy, anticipating a 2022 reinvestment rate of approximately 47%.
The Man Who Sold to Chesapeake. With $2.65 billion deal, fracking tycoon Rees-Jones ‘saved the best for last’. Forbes. Dallas billionaire Trevor Rees-Jones says he’s been running around “with my pants on fire” the last few weeks negotiating the $2.65 billion sale of Chief Oil & Gas to Chesapeake Energy. It’s the biggest deal of his career — $2 billion in cash plus $650 million in Chesapeake shares in exchange for Chief’s 113,000 acres producing 835 million cubic feet per day (and $500 million in annual profits) from the Marcellus Shale region of Pennsylvania.
PA Shale NatGas Production Record. Pa. shale gas production broke 21 Bcf/d mark in November 2021 as prices spiked. S&P Global. Pennsylvania’s shale gas drillers matched a November 2021 spike in Henry Hub gas prices by producing a record 21.26 Bcf/d, a 3.1% increase over the preceding month and a 6.4% year-over-year increase. The extra juice to break out of the 20 Bcf/d range, where Pennsylvania production lingered for most of 2021, appeared to come from the state’s smaller operators as Henry Hub prices rose above $6/MMBtu. The shape of drilling activity in Pennsylvania’s shale gas play — a barbell weighted by counties in the northeastern and southwestern corners of the state — changed little. But Greene County, in the liquids-rich portion of the shale south of Pittsburgh, had a 5.4% increase in volumes month over month, while Susquehanna County, in the dry gas window in the northeast, saw its volumes grow by 4.7% to 4.7 Bcf/d.
PA Lawmakers to Stop Municipalities from Banning NatGas Use. State lawmakers looking to stop Pennsylvania municipalities from banning natural gas use. The Center Square. The Pennsylvania House has approved legislation to block municipalities from enacting ordinances that prohibit the use of natural gas as a utility. House Bill 1947, sponsored by Rep. Tim O’Neal, R-Washington, would bar municipalities from blocking access to specific sources of energy. The bill is designed to preempt efforts to restrict the use of fossil fuels that have taken root in other states. “Some major U.S. cities have enacted or have proposed laws to ban or curb the use of fossil fuels in new homes and buildings,” O’Neal said. “It is important that people have the opportunity to choose their energy source and that a wide variety of options are available. By enacting this law, Pennsylvania would join states such as Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kansas and Louisiana in preserving choice.”
NatGas Has Biggest 1-Day Up Since 1990. Gas sees biggest 1-day price increase since 1990. Rigzone. The continuing strength of oil prices has been impressive but the February 2022 NYMEX Henry Hub Natural Gas futures contract ‘takes the cake’ for surprises this week. Trading a just few thousand contracts in the final 30 minutes, prices skyrocketed from $4.85/MMBtu to near $7.35/MMBtu, resulting in a $6.265/MMBtu final settlement. It was the biggest one-day price increase since 1990, the inception year for the contract. The move had all the signs of a classic short-squeeze, and the sharks were probably circling in the water.
Major LNG Projects Moving Forward. Global gas rally to kickstart long-stalled U.S. LNG projects. Reuters. High global natural gas prices are breaking a two-year logjam of new U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects with at least three of the multibillion-dollar proposals likely achieving enough supply contracts to start construction this year, said developers and industry experts. A Louisiana project that received a green light in 2019 was the last wholly new U.S. plant to receive a go-ahead, benefiting from then-strong demand from China and utilities swapping to LNG from coal. A dozen others were stalled, first by the China-U.S. trade war and then by the COVID-19 pandemic and environmental concerns.
MVP in Jeopardy This Week. Key U.S. shale pipeline in doubt after court ruling. A major U.S. natural gas pipeline project that’s crucial for shale drillers in the Appalachians is now in doubt after a court rejected its permit to cross a national forest in the Virginias. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on Tuesday tossed the federal government’s approval for Equitrans Midstream Corp.’s $6.2 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline to go through Jefferson National Forest, sending the shares of the company slumping the most since March 2020. Mountain Valley, which is more than 90% complete, aims to provide drillers in the gas-rich Appalachian Basin with much-needed takeaway capacity, after projects from Dominion Energy Inc., Duke Energy Corp. and Williams Cos. were scrapped amid fierce opposition from environmental groups.
Largest NatGas Draw of the Heating Season. US natural gas storage looks to record largest weekly draw of heating season. US natural gas storage volumes likely registered the largest drop of the season for the week ended Jan. 21, flipping the surplus to the five-year average to a deficit, as an even larger draw is expected for the week in progress due to colder temperatures and production declines. The US Energy Information Administration is expected to report a 214 Bcf withdrawal for the week ended Jan. 21, according to a survey of analysts by S&P Global Platts. Responses to the survey ranged from a 200-227 Bcf withdrawal. The EIA plans to release its weekly storage report on Jan. 27 at 10:30 am ET.
O&G Industry Generating Jobs in TX. Texas added 27,800 oil exploration and production jobs last year. Oil exploration and production companies in Texas added 27,800 jobs in 2021 as crude demand and prices began recovering from the pandemic-driven oil crash. Texas companies added 3,000 drilling and extraction workers in December, the eighth consecutive month of job gains. The state has 188,700 upstream workers, about 14 percent fewer than the 220,300 before the pandemic broke out in January 2020. “Texas is poised for continued economic growth as upstream job gains continue to climb,” TXOGA President Todd Staples said.
TX in Record Territory. Texas E&P industry back on track, with ‘record territory’ for Permian natural gas, oil. The Lone Star State’s exploration and production (E&P) economy enjoyed a year of recovery in 2021 on the heels of nearly two years of contraction, according to the latest Texas Petro Index (TPI). The TPI, created by petroleum economist Karr Ingham of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers (TAEP), measures growth rates and cycles of wellhead prices, rig counts, drilling permits, well completions, volume/value of production and E&P employment. “The Texas upstream oil and gas industry endured a punishing two-year contraction, the second year of which was at the hands of Covid, which finally came to an end with the January 2021 trough in the Texas Petro Index,” said Ingham.
Fracking at a Breakneck Pace. Oil explorers are fracking at breakneck pace. Transport Topics. Shale oil companies are using almost all of the fracking equipment and crews available as exploration expands, accelerating cost inflation and pointing to worsening supply chain disruptions across the industry. North American oil drillers appear likely to expand spending by more than 25% this year while overseas explorers are on course for a more modest increase in the mid-teens, Halliburton Co. executives said Jan. 24 after reporting their biggest quarterly profit in seven years. The world’s top provider of fracking services already is seeing tightening labor, trucking and raw material supplies, and in some regions as much as 80% of workers are transplants recruited from other areas.
French Love U.S. NatGas. Why U.S. natural gas is no longer too dirty for France. In October 2020, the French government blocked a $7 billion deal between Engie, a partially state-owned French energy enterprise, and NextDecade, a U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) company, because the gas was too dirty. But recently, it was revealed that a new, 11-year deal was quietly signed for that same fuel last June—this time between Engie and Cheniere Energy, a different U.S. LNG company. Most of the details of the new deal came from a recently unsealed letter by the U.S. Energy Department, in which Cheniere asks for “confidential treatment” of the purchase. Neither company has announced the agreement, and Cheniere has declined commenting on the multibillion-dollar LNG deal.
Halliburton Bullish on North America. 25% Increase in CAPEX. North American exploration and production (E&P) companies are set to increase their capital spending by 25% or more from 2021 as they ramp up activity to keep pace with rising global oil and gas demand, Halliburton Co. CEO Jeff Miller said Monday.
The management team shared a microphone to discuss the macro environment, and discuss the fourth quarter and full-year 2021 results. Miller is seeing positive signs for more work across the board, he told analysts.
“This is momentum that I have not seen in a long time,” he said of the activity levels by its E&P customers. Increased activity is underway in North America and the international markets, auguring well for oilfield services (OFS)
As the market for equipment and fleets has tightened, “pricing discussions” are ongoing with E&P customers, Miller said. Halliburton now has “pricing traction on new work and contract renewals, including integrated contracts. Additionally, we have introduced pay-for-performance models, negotiated favorable terms and conditions, and applied price escalation clauses.”
In the final three months of last year, the U.S. land rig count increased 84% year/year, with drilling activity outpacing completions as operators prepared their well inventory for 2022.
“We expect a busy 2022 in North America,” Miller said. “Given a strong commodity price environment, we anticipate North America customer spending to grow more than 25% year/year.”
The biggest capital expenditures (capex) are likely to be by the private E&Ps in 2022, with the public independents and majors continuing “to prioritize returns while delivering production into a supportive market,” he said.
That said, the “North America completions market is approaching 90% utilization, and Halliburton is sold out…Pricing for our fracturing fleets is moving higher across the board, both for our…low emissions equipment and our gear for diesel fleets…Anticipated demand growth for equipment provides a runway for us to increase pricing throughout the year.”
Last year the publicly held North American E&Ps showed restraint on raising capex or activity levels to maintain financial discipline. Instead, they worked to reduce the backlogs of drilled but uncompleted wells, aka DUCs. That’s likely to reverse this year, Miller said.
“This will further increase the call on equipment as operators add rigs throughout the year. The market is seeing tightness related to trucking, labor, sand and other inputs while we pass these increased costs on to operators.”
Said Miller, “There is no doubt the much-anticipated multi-year upcycle is now underway. North America production growth remains capped by operators’ capital discipline, while meaningful international production growth is challenged by years of underinvestment.
“Energy demand has proven its resilience, fueled by pent-up economic growth and the global desire to return to normalcy.” That puts Haliburton in the sweet spot, he said
“In a strong commodity price environment with limited production growth options, operators turn to short-cycle barrels and increased spend around the wellbore.”
Some of the optimistic comments mirrored those by top executives at the No. 1 OFS operator, Schlumberger Ltd., and at No. 2 global operator Baker Hughes Co., which issued their quarterly results last week
Houston-based Halliburton is No. 3 among global OFS operators, but it is the acknowledged No. 1 operator in the Lower 48. The company also is keeping pace with the competition by directing substantial capex to technology, which is an OFS operator’s lifeblood. For Halliburton, investments are continuing for both digital and hardware offerings, with more than 50 taken to market last year, Miller noted.
E&Ps also are “willing to pay a premium for differentiated, more environmentally friendly solutions,” he said, including for electric fracturing technology. Halliburton performs more hydraulic fracturing in the Lower 48 than any competitor.
“Expect fully electric locations to become a larger share of the market,” Miller told analysts. In addition, “100% of Halliburton’s drilling jobs run on a cloud-based, real-time system to deliver data and visualization to our customers around the world.”
Nearly 60% of the rig crews are “fully automated, allowing for up to a 70% reduction in headcount per rig.
Automation alleviates health and safety concerns by removing personnel from rigs, and it accelerates service delivery improvements and reduces the environmental footprint of oil and gas operations.”
Haliburton also continues to advance operations for a “sustainable energy future,” Miller said. Halliburton Labs’ Clean Energy Accelerator is helping “early-stage companies achieve important scaling milestones and significantly increase their enterprise value…We’re actively participating in the clean energy space without committing shareholder capital. However, it will evolve as energy evolves, and we will add to our already expanding opportunities to participate as clean energy value chains mature.”
For now, the company directs most of its capex to its two divisions: Completion and Production (C&P) and Drilling and Evaluation. The C&P division finished 2021 with 15% operating margin, “driven by activity improvement, despite inflationary pressures,” Miller said. The current completion tool order book “has more than doubled from a year ago, signaling strong growth and profitability again in 2022.”
Revenue increased in North America to $1.78 billion in 4Q2021 from $1.24 billion in 4Q2020. For the year, North American revenue climbed to $6.37 billion from 2020’s $5.73 billion.
Net profits in 4Q2021 were $824 million (92 cents/share), compared with a year-ago loss of $235 million (minus 27 cents). Quarterly revenue improved to $4.28 billion from $3.24 billion.
For 2021, Halliburton earned $1.5 billion ($1.63/share), versus a net loss in 2020 of $2.9 billion (minus $3.34). Total revenue in 2021 reached nearly $15.3 billion, versus $14.4 billion in 2020.
Petroleum Consumption Rising. Petroleum consumption increased in the United States last week amid rising gasoline and distillate production, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said Wednesday.
Demand hit 22.4 million b/d for the period ended Jan. 21, representing a 2.3% week/week increase. The overall gain stemmed largely from a 3.4% increase in gasoline consumption and a 4.3% jump in distillate fuels, which include diesel, according to EIA’s latest Weekly Petroleum Status Report.
Total petroleum products supplied over the last four-week period – EIA’s key gauge of demand — averaged 21.2 million b/d, up about 12% from the same period in 2021. During the past four weeks, motor gasoline consumption averaged 8.2 million b/d, up 6.1%, while distillate fuel demand averaged 4.2 million b/d, up 14.5%. Jet fuel product supplied jumped 24.5% to about 1.5 million b/d.
[Want today’s Henry Hub, Houston Ship Channel and Chicago Citygate prices? Check out NGI’s daily natural gas price snapshot now.]
The West Texas Intermediate oil price was $85.16/bbl on Jan. 21, or $1.34 above the previous week’s price and $32.88 more than a year ago, EIA said.
“The argument for higher prices tends to get a bit sloppier as storage builds challenge the low stockpile story,” said Mizuho Securities USA’s Robert Yawger, director of Energy Futures.
For the Jan. 21 period, U.S. crude oil production edged slightly downward by about 100,000 b/d to 11.6 million b/d. Domestic production remains more than 1 million b/d below pre-pandemic highs.
EIA data showed a 2.4 million bbl week/week build in U.S. commercial crude oil inventories, which finished last week at 416.2 million bbl. Domestic crude stocks ended last week about 8% below the five-year average for this time of year.
Last week’s build bucks an overall downward trend in crude stocks that EIA has observed.
Some oil bulls have predicted that oil prices will cross the $100/bbl threshold this year.
On a global scale, the International Energy Agency recently revised its 2022 oil demand outlook upward.
“The bullish momentum is primarily driven by military tensions and uncertainty in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, where the continued uncertainty surrounding Russia and Ukraine could jeopardize a significant portion of Russian oil flows should diplomatic talks break down and energy exports sanctions materialize,” said Rystad Energy’s Louise Dickson, senior Oil Markets analyst.
She added that oil benchmarks are rising, showing some “inflation immunity,” despite news that the Federal Reserve (Fed) may increase interest rates in March, a move that normally would place downside pressure on prices.
“The Fed’s announcement of a minor tweak to U.S. monetary policy is unlikely to drag down rising commodity prices immediately or even impactfully, as other supply-side constraints outweigh its impact,” Dickson said.
The oil market’s attention should shift from the Fed to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, aka OPEC-plus, said Dickson. She explained OPEC-plus will meet next week, and the market will look for signals from the gathering regarding lifting supply tightness and easing oil prices.
OPEC-plus “has underdelivered against its stated production targets by hundreds of thousands of barrels and has committed to a passive role in the conversation despite external pressures primarily from the U.S to increase production and ease fuel prices,” Dickson said.
She also noted that OPEC-plus would need to provide the “supply impetus that could calm markets and quell the demand for more production” when it meets as planned on Wednesday (Feb. 2), with top spare capacity producer Saudi Arabia taking the commanding role.
Hurray for Nick DeIuliis at CNX. (Thank you, Forbes) Two years ago, Nick Deluliis, CEO of CNX Resources, had no social media accounts – “I had no idea what to do with social media,” he told me with a laugh during a recent interview. Today, he is all over Twitter and other social media platforms, advocating for his company and his industry. He has his own podcast. He has authored a book that is coming out soon. It is the complete opposite approach you see taken by most CEOs in the energy business.
I asked him why he has chosen to become such a vocal advocate, given that it will inevitably make him a target to so many who oppose fossil fuels in any form. “I feel there’s an ethical duty, a leadership responsibility, there’s a social purpose of a business to accurately, rationally advocate for what you do on behalf of society and why what you do is not in the past, it’s not a bridge that’s going to go away; it’s the present and it’s the future. Particularly when mistruths are used to vilify what you do.” he answered. “When you think about what’s behind that, the domestic energy industry doesn’t produce a widget of methane: What it does is provide quality of life.
“That’s what we do as an industry. It’s not that complicated.”
CNX Resources is an interesting company. The company’s history goes back the Abraham Lincoln administration, when it was founded as a coal-producing company centered in Western Pennsylvania. All coal seams produce methane gas as a by-product, one that was menace to coal miners. For over a century, CNX’s main activity related to that methane was to find the most efficient way to remove it from the coal formation and either vent it into the atmosphere, or, later one when regulations changed, flare it.
“We got really good in the ‘70s and ‘80s at liberating methane from coal seams,” Deluliis told me when we talked recently, “to the point where towards the end of the ‘80s we said what if instead of venting the methane into the atmosphere or flaring it, why not collect it and process it? That’s really the genesis of how we got into the natural gas business.”
The original means of collecting, processing and selling the methane was via the drilling of vertical wells and hitting the rock with a smallish hydraulic fracturing job to release both the gas and the water that held it in place via formation pressure. With the advent of the shale revolution, those vertical wells eventually morphed into horizontal ones, the frac jobs grew larger, and the company eventually started also drilling into first the Marcellus shale formation and later, the Utica shale. Today, it is one of the largest natural gas producers in the Marcellus/Utica region, with the bulk of its assets still centered in Western Pennsylvania, southwest Virginia and West Virginia.
In our interview, Deluliis talked about his company not in the energy-related metrics and terms one normally associates with the oil and gas industry, but as a manufacturer instead. What is most interesting is the product he focuses on as the company’s main product.
“We don’t consider ourselves to be an upstream or midstream or E&P company,” he told me, “We consider ourselves to be a free cash flow manufacturer. Our job is to manufacture free cash flow safely and efficiently, and then we want to be smart allocators of that capital. We want to make our bets with respect to how we’re investing that free cash flow in the right places and at the right time. Our true north is always going to be our long-term intrinsic value per share.”
Deluliis has gained a reputation over the last year for his willingness to be an outspoken advocate for his company and industry, one who hasn’t been shy about being critical of the ESG investor movement that has become so successful in influencing the management philosophies at many energy companies in recent years. I noted that the strategy Deluliis deploys at CNX seems pretty consistent with the Governance-related objectives advocated by these ESG investors, but he disagreed.
“Our philosophy is a non-energy, non-E&P philosophy,” he said. “You can call it Benjamin Graham 101, or Warren Buffet or whatever. What we’re doing is we’re sort of copying some playbooks from either entities or companies or industries that have embraced that through the years. You just have to be willing to a) embrace it and then b) stick to it when things get volatile within your individual piece of the universe.”
On ESG investors and what they’ve been able to achieve, Deluliis is not entirely negative. But he sees the results of the influence they wield not just in energy, but across society as a whole, in what he calls a breakdown between “the good, the bad and the ugly.”
“On the good side of this – and we’ve been a proof point for it – if you look at any industry that is in manufacturing or energy, anything that requires the interaction of humans with some process or some activity, the safest, the most compliant, they’re the most efficient. The most efficient – in the case of widgets or methane molecules or whatever it is – they’re going to be the most profitable. I am all on board with this,” he told me.
“The bad side is when you start getting these different constituent groups to try to put some sort of quick and easy filter on how to come up with either an ESG fund, or to screen companies with a filter for the ESG metrics. This is tremendously hard work. You have to intimately understand the industry. The data are not going to lend themselves to a quick and easy screening on an Excel spreadsheet from an office in California or Manhattan.
“It’s an awful lot of very hard work, and what’s happened is, I think, both the raising of funds and capital that are ESG-centric, as well as the screening and evaluation of companies in this push to make this easy and efficient and quick, they’re coming up with some non-logical conclusions. They’re missing the whole point of what drives ESG.
“The ugly side of ESG and what you want to call the ‘green’ movement or sustainability or zero carbon economies and all these different things that you hear out there, the data points are piling up on one another, to the point where it’s undeniable.”
Deluliis talks at length about the fact that ESG groups and the climate alarm movement in general engage in a dishonest sort of accounting when it comes to their pretense that wind and solar power are somehow carbon free. The failure of and lack of accountability for their refusal to consider the cradle-to-grave carbon footprints of the China-centered mining activities, processing activities and manufacturing and supply chain activities flies in the face of reality, creating a false picture of what are favored, but in fact dirtier-than-advertised industries. “If there was a public company or an investment house that was doing the same sort of faulty accounting, the convenient ignoring of facts when it came to EBITDA, cash flow, net income, GAAP or non-GAAP measures, the SEC, attorneys general, shareholder suits, there would be so much pushback and consequences to that that it would topple the investment house or the company, and rightfully so,” he said.
Deluliis also points to the influence of the ESG and climate alarm movements, and the “green” pretenses they promote as having led to a set of perverse incentives and disastrous energy-related outcomes in recent years.
“I look at what’s going on in Europe with respect to geopolitics,” he said. “It is no coincidence that Putin is amassing whatever he’s amassing along the border with Ukraine during the winter, and this whole issue of gas pipelines and Nordstream 2 is at the center of it. It’s not a coincidence that all these things are happening at the same time. That creates leverage for him and for Russia.
“Boston is another case in point for all of this. Boston has embraced co-called renewables and the zero-carbon economy to the point where Boston and Massachusetts and New York won’t allow pipelines to be built from Pennsylvania to Boston City Gate. Winter hits like it is now, you look at what is going on in Boston Harbor, there’s LNG tankers coming in. Oftentimes those tankers are coming from 4,000+ miles away, from Russia.
“To me, it just defies logic that you would preclude a methane molecule from PA that is 400 miles away from Boston City Gate, and instead you’re going to run into the arms of Russian LNG with a 4,000-mile supply chain. Think about what the carbon footprint of that is.”
Deluliis also points to last year’s grid collapse in Texas as being by and large a result of a counterproductive set of subsidies and incentives put into place by virtue-signaling policymakers redirecting billions of investment dollars away from ensuring grid stability and capacity adequacy and into the building of wind farms in West Texas, hundreds of miles away from the market centers they need to serve. “You’ve got billions of dollars of taxpayer money that’s going towards multi-billion-dollar corporations via subsidies,” he said, “and a lot of that subsidization is being paid for by tax abatements in West Texas for the poorest school districts you will find in the state. How does that make any sense with respect to what’s sustainable?”
He points to a similar set of bad incentives that led to the devolution of what had been a world-class power grid in California. “You’ve got a grid in California that was a pre-meditated evolution from best-in-class, first-world to basically now third-world.”
These things – all of these things – are not the things you normally see the CEOs of multi-billion-dollar energy companies saying in public. Other CEOs might believe these things, but internal and external pressures from investors, customers and boards of directors tend to make most of them shy away from speaking their minds in such a forthright manner, a reality that frustrates Deluliis.
“You’ve got CEOs in corporate America today that will not only shy away from the CO2 math and reality of things, they’ll pretend all these other things are real. It just shows you how truth, rational logic and science have been commandeered by political science, religion and ideology, and that’s not a good thing for anybody.”
CNX Energy is an interesting company led by an even more interesting CEO. I wish Nick Deluliis well. Because he’s right, you know.
PA Permit January 17, to January 27, 2022
County Township E&P Companies
- Armstrong South Buffalo Snyder Bros.
- Clinton Grugan STL Resources
- Clinton Grugan STL Resources
- Clinton Grugan STL Resources
- Elk Jones Seneca
- Elk Jones Seneca
- Elk Jones Seneca
- Elk Jones Seneca
- Elk Jones Seneca
- Elk Jones Seneca
- Elk Jones Seneca
- Elk Jones Seneca
- Lycoming Lewis Range
- Lycoming Lewis Range
- Lycoming Lewis Range
- Lycoming Lewis Range
- Lycoming Lewis Range
- Susquehanna Rush Repsol
- Susquehanna Rush Repsol
- Susquehanna Rush Repsol
- Susquehanna Rush Repsol
- Washington Buffalo Range
- Washington Buffalo Range
- Washington Buffalo Range
- Washington Buffalo Range
- Washington Smith Range
- Washington Smith Range
- Washington Smith Range
OH Permits January 18, to January 21, 2022
County Township E&P Companies
- Columbiana Fairfield Hilcorp
- Belmont Wheeling Ascent
- Belmont Wheeling Ascent
- Belmont Wheeling Ascent
- Jefferson Smithfield Ascent
- Jefferson Smithfield Ascent
- Monroe Lee SWN
- Monroe Lee SWN
- Monroe Adams SWN
WV Permits January 17, to January 21, 2022
- Doddridge Antero
- Doddridge Antero
- Doddridge Antero
- Doddridge Antero
- Doddridge Antero
- Doddridge Antero
- Doddridge Antero
- Lewis HG Energy
- Lewis HG Energy
- Lewis HG Energy
- Lewis HG Energy
- Marshall SWN
- Marshall SWN
- Marshall SWN
- Marshall Tug Hill
- Marshall Tug Hill
- Marshall Tug Hill
- Marshall Tug Hill
- Marshall Tug Hill
- Marshall Tug Hill
- Tyler Antero
- Tyler Antero
- Tyler Antero
- Tyler Antero
- Tyler Antero
- Tyler Antero
- Wetzel EQT
- Wetzel Tribune Resources
