The Oil Drum: Local

As people following our energy situation are aware, many if not most energy stocks are down 60-70% or more from their summer highs. In a bizarre but not completely surprising announcement after the close (we knew someone was liquidating), Chesapeake, (the US largest natural gas producer) CEO Aubrey McClendon has been involuntarily liquidated out of his rougly 30,000,000 remaining shares of CHK in the past 3 days due to margin calls. CHK, which in July was over $70 per share, hit as low as $11.99 today, and then had a 38% rally to close at $16.52 on 5 times normal volume. We don't typically comment on individual stocks or price movements on TOD but this and related NG stock developments could have a significant impact on the industry's future - CHK and XTO in addition to being top 2 gas producers also operate over 12% of our nat gas rigs. In addition to McClendons margin call, Chesapeake also announced further reductions in capex budgets going forward which means lower natural gas production, and thus higher prices, ceteris paribus. To make things more complicated, the majority of complicated financial hedges undertaken by CHK, are at Morgan Stanley, which fell to single digits today. This is all very good news for natural gas prices but bad news for both Aubrey McClendon and the North American energy situation.