EQT’s wild ride almost over, CFO says at annual meeting
To employees of EQT Corp. who are overstressed and overworked from a very eventful few years, CFO Rob McNally says the end is near.
“We’ve gone from one transaction to the next,” he said Thursday after the company’s annual shareholder meeting. “Hopefully there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and people can get their feet on the ground again. We do recognize that it has been a heavy lift.”
It was Mr. McNally, a senior vice president at the firm, who presided over the sparsely attended annual shareholder meeting at EQT Plaza, Downtown. Dave Porges, who stepped back in as interim CEO in March when his predecessor, Steve Schotterbeck, abruptly resigned over a pay dispute after just a year at the helm, wasn’t even in the room.
Mr. Porges had a prior commitment, Mr. McNally explained.
A committee of the board of directors is interviewing CEO candidates now. A new leader should be in place by the end of the third quarter, Mr. McNally said, by the time EQT completes its previously-announced split into two separate companies — one focused on drilling and producing natural gas and the other on pipelines and compression.
In the meantime, the work of heralding the company’s accomplishments over the past year fell to Mr. McNally.
He ticked off the big-ticket items, including:
1) EQT’s $6.7 billion acquisition of Rice Energy Inc. 2) A five-year record for safety 3) Raising $3 billion in public debt
4) Getting federal approval to build the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 303-mile stretch of 42-inch diameter pipe to ferry gas through Virginia and West Virginia.
As he spoke, a group of protesters chanted outside EQT Plaza. They gathered in opposition to the pipeline project, which they vowed to stop.
“This is my water,” Trish McLawhorn repeated over and over, holding up photos of wet, muddy ground she said were taken near her property in Montgomery County, Va.
Inside, Mr. McNally said the level of opposition to Mountain Valley, which has inspired treesits, lawsuits and multistate campaigns, is “what we expected.”
“We’d built in slack in the schedule to accommodate protest delays,” he said, budgeting for a six-day week, but working all seven. He doesn’t think the strong opposition is singling out EQT— all pipelines built in recent years have been targeted for protests, he said.
People chaining themselves to bulldozers to prevent tree clearing is “fairly normal and somewhat routine,” Mr. McNally said.
He said the schedule calls for the pipeline to start moving gas by the end of the year, although certain stream crossing permits in West Virginia are still being hashed out.
Later on Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth District ordered a halt to the construction of the pipeline across streams in West Virginia while the court evaluates a lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club and other environmental groups. “I’m sure there are some minor things that if we could do over, we would do it differently,” Mr. McNally said earlier in the day. “Unfortunately, if you’re going to lay a 42-inch pipeline, you are going to have an impact.”