After an eventful proxy battle and half a dozen lawsuits, EQT Corp. shareholders approved the company’s acquisition of Canonsburg-based Rice Energy Inc. Thursday morning.
Preliminary results indicate 84 percent voted in favor of the $6.7 billion deal.
Rice shareholders also approved the deal on Thursday, with 74 percent of the vote. The deal will be final on Monday, the companies said.
This was the companies’s last hurdle in forming the nation’s largest natural gas operator.
Downtown-based EQT and Canonsburg-based Rice are both major players in southwestern Pennsylvania, especially in Greene County where their proximity to each other was sold as a main value driver of the deal. EQT has said that after the deal closes, it will be able to drill longer horizontal wells, improving the economics of the process.
Announced in June, the deal will give Rice Energy shareholders $5.30 in cash and .37 shares of EQT common stock for each share they now own in Rice. Both companies’ stock prices rose by less than 2 percent after shareholders approved the merger on Thursday.
Anya Litvak: alitvak@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1455.
First Published: November 9, 2017, 2:27 p.m.