By Candy Woodall, PennLive.com, January 22, 2016

Southwestern Energy is cutting 1,100 employees amid financial struggles in an oil and gas market showing no signs of recovery.

Some 200 jobs will be cut in northeastern and southwestern shale areas of Pennsylvania, where the promise of big employment numbers buoyed the state during the recession. The company still has about 230 workers in Pennsylvania.

Another 900 jobs will be cut throughout Southwestern’s operations in Texas and Arkansas.

It will spend about $45 million on severance payments, according to a Thursday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

For the last few years, drillers here have been pumping resources into an oversaturated market and contributing to the worst oil bust since the 1980s.

Southwestern said in its SEC filing that it currently has no drilling rigs in operation.

Rig count has steadily fallen across the country and in Pennsylvania, according to Lou D’Amico, president and executive director of the Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association. Rig count is now less than 25 percent of what it was in 2011, he said.

There were 25 rigs in Pennsylvania as of the Jan. 8 report, down from 51 a year earlier, according to a recent report from industry supplier Baker Hughes. By comparison, there were 115 rigs statewide in January 2012.

Now, companies are slashing capital expenditures for drilling in 2016-17, and many analysts say they could be facing bankruptcy. ”With gas prices expected to stay low, this problem will not go away quickly or easily,” D’Amico said.

http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/01/southwestern_energy_cuts_1100.html

From the Longview News-Journal, January 22, 2016 

With numbers slipping in the state’s big shale plays, Texas led the way in a decline in the number of rigs exploring for oil this week, Baker Hughes Inc. said Friday in its weekly report.

The number of U.S. rigs exploring for oil fell by five to 510, the oil field services company said, extending a recent string of weekly declines.

The number of oil rigs has fallen sharply since oil prices began to fall — but not enough to ease a global glut of crude that has depressed prices and led to layoffs across the oil patch.

The number of gas rigs operating in the U.S. declined by eight this week to 127. The total rig count was down 13 to 637.

The two biggest shale plays in Texas saw seven oil and gas rigs shut down this week.

South Texas’ Eagle Ford saw its rig count decline by four this week and West Texas’ Permian lost three more.

In total, Texas lost seven rigs to finish the week with 294. A year ago, Texas had more than 750 rigs operating. The Permian Basin still leads the nation with 199 active rigs, while the Eagle Ford is second with 64.

The gas rig losses came from Louisiana’s Haynesville shale and the Marcellus shale play in the Northeast. The Haynesville dropped from 23 active rigs to 18 this week, while the Marcellus lost three to 35.

After Texas, the biggest loser by state was Pennsylvania, which was down three. Kansas, New Mexico and North Dakota dropped two each and California was off one. Alaska gained two rigs and Ohio gained one.

http://www.news-journal.com/news/2016/jan/22/texas-leads-the-way-in-rig-count-decline/