Report: Chesapeake Energy plans to file for bankruptcy

Oklahoma-based company led land rush into northeast Pennsylvania at start of fracking boom

Susan Phillips

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Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, file

A Chesapeake Energy rig in Oklahoma.

April 30, 2020 | 6:36 PM

Susan Phillips / StateImpact Pennslyvania

Chesapeake had a large presence in Bradford County. A billboard touts the gas company’s support of a local hospital.

One of Pennsylvania’s largest and most controversial shale gas drillers, Chesapeake Energy, has taken steps toward filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, according to a Reuters report.

Under the direction of its high-spending, risk-taking CEO, Aubrey McClendon, the Oklahoma-based company led the land rush into northeast and north central Pennsylvania that helped kick off the fracking boom about a decade ago.

“They would come into a community and lease and lease and lease,” said Bill Holland, who covers natural gas for S&P Global Market Intelligence.

By doing so, the company took on debt. And eventually, the fracking boom it helped create led to a glut of natural gas, and prices tanked. At the beginning of Pennsylvania’s shale boom in 2009, the price of Marcellus Shale gas was about $14/million British thermal units, but by 2016 it had dropped to less than $2/MmBtu, and it remains in that range today.

McClendon resigned from Chesapeake in 2013 and started another energy company. He died in March 2016 after his car slammed into an overpass in Oklahoma City a day after he was indicted on federal conspiracy charges.

In Pennsylvania, Chesapeake has faced allegations that it cheats landowners out of royalty money. The company has denied that. However, it’s the target of a number of class-action lawsuits, and in October, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed to take a case launched by the state Attorney General.

In May 2011, the Department of Environmental Protection fined the company about $1 million, at the time the largest fine issued by the DEP. Chesapeake had polluted several drinking wells in Bradford County.

The company holds 3,471 drilling permits in the state but has just 993 active wells, according to the DEP.

Though Chesapeake Energy is on shaky ground, other Pennsylvania shale producers have actually benefited from the current drop in oil prices and the COVID-19 crisis. That’s because drops in oil production in places like Texas are accompanied by drops in natural-gas production as well.

Less supply nationwide, and an increase in natural gas-generated electricity, means prices for Marcellus Shale producers are expected to start creeping back up by the end of this year.