Aubrey McClendon on “Mad Money”: Chesapeake’s a Target for Short Sellers

• Joe Wertz
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  Joe Wertz was a reporter and managing editor for StateImpact Oklahoma from 2011-2019. He reported on energy and environment issues for national NPR audiences and other national outlets. He previously worked as a managing editor, assistant editor and staff reporter at several major Oklahoma newspapers and studied journalism at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon sat down with Mad Money‘s Jim Cramer and talked about the company’s future and its recent controversy.

It was McClendon’s first televised interview since questions concerning the intertwined finances of the Oklahoma’s City company and its CEO surfaced earlier this year. In the interview, “McClendon blamed much of the negative press surrounding the company on short sellers,” reports the Journal Record‘s Brianna Bailey:

Chesapeake has become a favorite target for short sellers who like to bet the company won’t make the transition fast enough from natural gas to oil, won’t recover from its governance issues and that natural gas prices will remain low, McClendon said.

“Consider there are people out there with agendas that would like our stock to go down,” McClendon said. “It explains some of the background on the stories about us.”

A Chesapeake drilling rig served as a backdrop for Cramer’s interview, which was taped in Ohio’s Utica Shale, an expansive natural gas play that extends into New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The formation could hold 38 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered gas, Scott Detrow of StateImpact Pennsylvania reports:

In addition to the natural gas, the USGS believes the Utica could hold 940 million barrels of oil, and 9 million barrels of liquid natural gas.