EIA issued its 2nd quarter financial review of the E&P industry, found here. Highlights:
Production is declining for the first time since the beginning of 2014 (click to enlarge).
Companies are losing cash (click to enlarge):
Texas Tribune September 24, 2015 – by Ross Ramsey:
What happens when an elected official says “we” is that we think they’re talking about us — the people who elected them. Sometimes, that’s right. In fact, it’s right most of the time.
Not at the Texas Railroad Commission. It’s a three-person state commission elected by Texas voters and seemingly owned and operated by the oil and gas industry it regulates. Go hear one of their speeches at an industry conference sometime and listen for this: Do they call it “your industry” when talking to oil and gas people, or do they call it “our industry.” A recent sampling suggests the latter.
The Texas Railroad Commission has submitted its “Self-Evaluation Report” to the Texas Sunset Commission, in anticipation of Sunset Commission review of the RRC in the next legislative session in 2017.
Under Texas’ sunset law, every Texas agency must periodically undergo review by the Sunset Commission and be re-authorized by legislative action. The Sunset Commission reviews and recommends changes to legislation governing the agency – or may recommend abolishment of the agency.
Initially reviewed in 2011, the Railroad Commission’s Sunset bill did not pass in the 2011 legislative session. Instead, the 82nd Legislature continued the Railroad Commission under Sunset review for another two years. In 2013, the Sunset Commission again reviewed the RRC and recommended significant changes, including changing the agency’s name, limiting when Commissioners could solicit and receive campaign contributions, and requiring the automatic resignation of a Commissioner running for another elected office. The Sunset Commission also recommended several funding changes, including eliminating the statutory cap on the Oil and Gas Regulation and Cleanup Fund and creating a new pipeline permit fee to help support the agency’s pipeline safety program.
The Sunset recommendations were incorporated into Senate Bill 212. The Senate passed this bill in 2013, but ultimately the bill was left pending in the House Energy Resources Committee. The only significant legislation that did pass was a requirement that commissioners resign to run for another office – a bill vetoed by the Governor. The legislature required the RRC to undergo sunset review again in 2017.
The RRC’s Self-Evaluation Report, required by the Sunset Commission, can be found here. Largely self-laudatory, it does contain lots of data about RRC activities. Excerpts: Continue reading →
During my vacation I read The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789, by Joseph J. Ellis. Ellis tells the story of the writing and passage of the US Constitution, orchestrated, he asserts, by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison (the quartet).
Before the adoption of the Constitution, the thirteen states were essentially independent countries who had won their independence but failed to found a new country. The “United States” were always referred to in the plural. The genius of the quartet, says Ellis, was the compromise they crafted in the Constitution in the debate over federal vs. state power. States were understandably reluctant to relinquish their sovereignty, but the quartet knew that the new nation, to survive, had to have federal power – to levy taxes, provide for common defense, and regulate commerce among the states. The Constitution enumerates the powers of the federal government. The Bill of Rights – the first ten amendments to the Constitution, passed simultaneously — enumerates the rights retained by the states and the people, limitations on federal power. The tenth amendment provides: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The contours of this compromise are still being debated in courts across the land. “States rights” were fighting words in the civil war, and today are the battle cry of states seeking to curb the federal government’s regulation of health care, water quality, voting rights, and abortion.
The Texas Supreme Court yesterday granted Coyote Lake Ranch’s petition to review the Amarillo Court of Appeals’ opinion holding that the accommodation doctrine does not apply to severed groundwater. View my previous post on the case here.
In January, the El Paso Court of Appeals decided the appeal of Lazy R. Ranch, LP, et al. vs. ExxonMobil Corporation. The court reversed a summary judgment in favor of Exxon and remanded the case to the trial court for a trial on the merits. Exxon has asked the Texas Supreme Court to review the El Paso Court’s decision. Exxon argues that it has conclusively proven that Lazy R’s claims are barred by limitations.
The Lazy R Ranch is 20,000 acres in Ector, Crane, Ward and Winkler Counties. Exxon had operations on the ranch for many years. In 2009, the Ranch hired an environmental firm to investigate several sites on the property for oil-related contamination. The environmental firm found substantial hydrocarbon contamination at five sites, and found that at one of the sites the contamination had percolated down into the groundwater and that contamination at the other sites also posed a risk of leaching down into the groundwater. Lazy R sued Exxon for an injunction to require Exxon to take sufficient steps to prevent further spread of the contamination into the subsurface and groundwater.
The trial court ruled that the Ranch had waited too long to sue and dismissed its claims. The El Paso Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the statute of limitations does not apply because the Ranch is only suing for an injunction to require Exxon to abate a continuing nuisance, the spread of hydrocarbon contamination into the subsurface.
A federal judge in Dallas has ruled that Chesapeake cannot deduct post-production costs on the Plaintiffs’ leases covering lands in Tarrant and Johnson Counties, in the Barnett shale. The order can be viewed here: Winscott – Order on MSJs
The case is Trinity Valley School, et al. vs. Chesapeake Operating, Inc., et al., No. 3:13-CV-08082-K, in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Judge Ed Winscott presiding. The order, although a partial summary judgment, appears to resolve Chesapeake’s claim of right to deduct post-production costs. Plaintiffs include Ed Bass, the Harris Methodist Southwest Hospital and Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. The language construed in the leases varies, but all of the leases contain language dealing with sales to an affiliate.
As I have discussed before, Chesapeake sells its gas at the well to its affiliate Chesapeake Energy Marketing (CEMI). The price on which Chesapeake pays royalties is based on the weighted average price CEMI receives for the gas less gathering and transportation costs incurred by CEMI and a CEMI marketing fee.
Last week, the US Energy Information Administration provided a summary of states’ severance tax revenue (click on image below to enlarge):
With the precipitous decline in oil prices, Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming will be hurting.
According to EIA, Texas
Big news this week about the Environmental Protection Agency’s new proposed regulations to limit emissions of methane and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from oil and gas drilling, operating, compression and processing facilities. EPA’s proposed new rules can be viewed here. Among other things, the proposed regs would require operators to use “green completion” technology in drilling and completing wells, to reduce emissions of natural gas during those operations. The proposed rules would apply only to “new sources” of emissions, not existing facilities.
Representative Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, called the proposed rules “yet another example of the Obama administration’s war on American energy jobs.” Barry Russell, CEO of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, said the proposed rules would cause “unnecessary costs and added uncertainty” that would “inflict more pain on the men and women who work in the oil and gas industry at a time when market forces are already creating economic challenges.” Environmentalists praised the proposed regulations, but said that EPA needs to begin regulating emissions from existing facilities.
VOCs are carbon-based molecules that evaporate at ordinary temperatures and pressures, and are emitted into the air during oil and gas production, gathering, transportation and processing activities. They include benzene, ethylbenzene, and n-hexane, which are harmful to human health. VOCs and methane are also powerful greenhouse gases, contributing to global warming according to scientific consensus.
Chesapeake is spending a lot of money on lawyers.
Dan McDonald, a Fort Worth attorney, has filed some 250 cases against Chesapeake contending that it is underpaying its royalty owners. Companies affiliated with former House of Representatives Speaker Tom Craddick have now been added to McDonald’s client list. So many cases have been filed against it in Texas that Chesapeake asked the cases to be granted multidistrict litigation status, so that one judge could control pretrial discovery and motions and settings. Two judges have been appointed for that purpose, one for McDonald’s cases and another for cases brought by other attorneys. Chesapeake is settling cases as fast as it can.
Most of the claims against Chesapeake arise from its structure for selling gas. Chesapeake sells its gas at the wellhead to its wholly owned subsidiary Chesapeake Energy Marketing. Chesapeake Energy Marketing arranges for the gathering of the gas and delivery to central sales points, and pays Chesapeake for the gas based on a weighted average price of all sales at those central gathering points, less costs of compression, gathering, treating and transportation, and less a “marketing fee” charged by Chesapeake Energy Marketing. The costs incurred between the wellhead and the point of delivery to the purchaser were formerly incurred by another Chesapeake affiliate, Access Midstream. Chesapeake spun off its gathering systems into a separate company a few years ago, and as part of that deal it guaranteed a minimum rate of return on those gathering systems to the new spin-off company, thereby receiving a premium price in the market for the new company’s shares. Chesapeake pays royalties based on the new price it receives from Chesapeake Energy Marketing, after deduction of post-production costs and marketing fees. McDonald says that these “costs” are “sham sales” and “fraudulent transactions.”
