EQT Corporation (EQT) held a conference call in late October 2010 to discuss the company’s financial results for the third quarter of 2010. The company made comments on its acreage that is prospective for the Marcellus Shale.
The Marcellus Shale is becoming a major area of operations for the company and over the last year production from the Marcellus Shale has reached 20% of the company’s production.
“Contribution from the Marcellus shale play alone is growing rapidly and represented nearly 20% of our volumes in this quarter, up from only 2% in the third quarter of 2009.”
“EQT has spud a total of 132 horizontal wells in the Marcellus play of which 53 are currently online. Of the 79 wells not yet online, 18 are either currently drilling or have been pop-holed, 42 are drilled and awaiting a frac job and 19 have been fraced and are awaiting pipeline hookups.”
“Another way we look at our progress internally is by frac stages online or in the system for our Marcellus wells. As of the end of the quarter 595 frac stages are online 246 are completed, but not yet online. And 789 are planned for well spud, but the not yet fraced.”
“After having accounted for only 2% of our sales from our third quarter of 2009 and the Marcellus accounted for nearly 20% of our sales of produced natural from third quarter of 2010 and we expect Marcellus to account for about 30% of fourth quarter sales.”
“A well in Greene County well which had a 30 day production rate of 22 million cubic feet per day is currently constrained to allow for the fracing of 7 wells on the same pad. On the last full day of production October 12, the 37th day, this well had a 24 hour rate of 20.2 million cubic feet equivalent per day.”
“The Armstrong County well, which had a 24 hour production rate of 15 million cubic feet per day is also turned in line. Due to capacity constraints in that area, this well is producing under 2 million cubic feet per day right now, which happens to be the total takeaway capacity in that area. Given the takeaway constraints, we will not have meaningful initial 30 day production data from this well.”
“Approximately 40% of our 500,000 Marcellus acres contain wet gas. Structurally one positive for EQT is that it appears unnecessary to invest our own capital even as part of a joint venture to process fractionate and transport our wet gas and liquids in the Marcellus.”
