Has The Red Queen Fallen Off Treadmill In The Marcellus? -- April 29, 2017

Updates

Later, 12:45 p.m. Central Time: by the way, did anyone spot this paragraph at the very end of the linked article in the original post:

After drilling 27 gas wells in North Louisiana in the first quarter, Range Resourcdes Corp shut in some production to avoid “frac hits,” or damage that can occur to an older shale well located next to a newer one. [See tag: fracking_halo_effect]

Later, 11:33 a.m. Central Time: see first comment from a reader who really follows the Marcellus closely --

Bizarre article on so many accounts.

The productivity of Marcellus wells this past 12 months has been astonishing.

Range just completed 4 wells on a pad and could only turn 2 of them online as their output - 31 MMcfd - was so high that there was no capacity on the pipeline for the remaining 2. (31 MMcf of high Btu gas is equivalent to about 6,000 barrels of oil).

Cabot's CEO spent a lot of time on the conference call the other day discussing plans for the anticipated quarter billion dollar a year free cash flow which has already begun.
Enno Peters' great site, shaleprofile.com, enables one to observe the incredible productivity of Marcellus wells.

Two big pipelines which are being built, the Rover and Leach Xpress, will be in service in a few months.

The combined capacity of almost 5 Bcf - slightly below Haynesville's TOTAL daily output - will allow Appalachian Basin output to skyrocket by year's end.

This area has not even begun to show its potential.

Original Post

A most interesting article.

Producers have to drill at a breakneck pace just to keep output stable -- a phenomenon known as the Red Queen, after the character in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass” who tells Alice, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” While the number of gas rigs has climbed 90 percent over the past year, output of the fuel in the lower-48 states is down 1.1 percent, data from Bloomberg and Baker Hughes Inc. show.