Number Of Active Rigs Increases By One; Six Wells Coming Off Confidential Today -- February 19, 2019

Wells coming off the confidential list today--Tuesday, February 19, 2019: 82 wells for the month; 185 wells for the quarter
32173, conf, Hess, CA-Anderson Smith-155-96-2635H-6, 
32163, conf, Hess, CA-Anderson Smith-155-96-2635H-5, 
30536, conf, Slawson, Wolf 1 SLH, 
30138, conf, CLR, Pletan 7-18H, 
28956, conf, Hess, EN-Jeffrey-15509402215H-9, 
28955, conf, Hess, EN-Jeffrey-155-94-2215H-8,


Active rigs:

$55.91	2/19/2019	02/19/2018	02/19/2017	02/19/2016	02/19/2015
Active Rigs	65	56	40	38	127

RBN Energy: can gas-pipe projects through New York be reversed?

The vast majority of the incremental natural gas pipeline capacity out of the Marcellus/Utica production area in recent years is designed to transport gas to either the Midwest, the Gulf Coast or the Southeast. Advancing these projects to construction and operation hasn’t always been easy, but generally speaking, most of the new pipelines and pipeline reversals have come online close to when their developers had planned. In contrast, efforts to build new gas pipelines into nearby New York State — a big market and the gateway to gas-starved New England — have hit one brick wall after another. At least until lately. In the past few weeks, one federal court ruling breathed new life into National Fuel Gas’s long-planned Northern Access Pipeline and another gave proponents of the proposed Constitution Pipeline hope that their project may finally be able to proceed. Today, we consider recent legal developments that may at long last enable new, New York-bound outlets for Marcellus/Utica gas to be built.

The road to New York. See also this op-ed at The WSJ. Gas shortages give New York an early taste of the Green Nude Eel, as Nancy Pelosi calls the plan proposed by Occasional-Cortex. New York is dependent on imports even though it sits atop the abundant Marcellus shale.

The combination of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling—sometimes known as the “shale revolution”—has enabled Texas, Pennsylvania and other states to produce record quantities of natural gas, some of which is being frozen, loaded onto giant ships, and transported to customers in places like Chile, China and India. Thanks to the environmental policies of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York has missed out on this windfall.

Now, in a preview of what life might be like under the Democrats’ proposed Green New Deal, some New Yorkers are about to face a natural-gas shortage. Consolidated Edison , an energy utility that provides gas and power to the New York City area, announced last month that beginning in mid-March it would “no longer be accepting applications for natural gas connections from new customers in most of our Westchester County service area.” The reason for the shortage is obvious: The Cuomo administration has repeatedly blocked or delayed new pipeline projects. As a Con Ed spokesman put it, there is a “lot of natural gas around the country, but getting it to New York has been the strain.”

New York policy makers have also killed the state’s natural-gas-drilling business. In 2008 New York drillers produced about 150 million cubic feet of natural gas a day—not enough to meet all the state’s needs, but still a substantial amount. That same year legislators in Albany passed a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, the process used to wring oil and gas out of underground rock formations. In 2015 the Cuomo administration made the moratorium permanent. By 2018 New York’s gas production had declined so much that the Energy Information Administration quit publishing numbers on it.

New York now imports nearly all of its gas even though part of the Marcellus Shale, one of the biggest and most prolific sources of natural gas in the country, extends into the state’s Southern Tier region. To get an idea of how much gas the state might have been able to produce from the Marcellus, New Yorkers can look across the state line to Pennsylvania, which now supplies about two-thirds of the gas consumed in New York. At the end of 2018, Pennsylvania drillers were producing about 18 billion cubic feet of gas a day. That’s more gas than Canada now produces.

Much more at the link.