NY Constitution Pipeline Not Dead Yet, FERC Grants 2-Yr Extension
Miracle of miracles, two (!) Democrat FERC commissioners (Cheryl LaFleur and Dick Glick), along with one Republican commissioner (Chairman Neil Chatterjee), voted unanimously to extend the time frame by another two years for Williams to build the Constitution Pipeline. As you may recall, the Constitution was stopped cold by corrupt NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his lackeys at the state Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC). Constitution is planned to run from Susquehanna County, PA up into, and mostly situated in, New York State. Cuomo won’t be happy with this decision because it’s a very loud and clear signal that FERC believes the project *will* some day get built.
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Yet another Range Resources alumnus is now working for someone else–himself. Matt Curry, a chemical engineer and Pittsburgh native who used to work for Range, along with Chris Combs, who’s worked for a number of drilling services companies in Texas, co-founded Praetorian Energy Solutions, a “pressure pumping and pumpdown services” headquartered in Canonsburg, PA. The company, launched earlier this year, is (so far) working in the Eagle Ford Shale play in Texas–because that’s where they bought their equipment. That equipment will be heading north soon to operate in the Marcellus/Utica. What is a pressure pumping/pumpdown company?
More than four years ago MDN posed the question, could an alternate trading hub like Dominion South in Pennsylvania ever replace the venerable Henry Hub trading hub in Louisiana as the world benchmark (see 
We spotted an intriguing editorial in the Williamsport Sun-Gazette. It quotes a study by “an independent, market-based think tank” with some phenomenal findings. If you invest $1 million in solar, over a 30-year period you’ll get around 25 million kilowatt hours of electricity. If you invest that same $1 million in wind, you’ll get 50 million kilowatt hours over a 30-year period. But if you invest the same $1 million in natural gas-fired electric generation (cost to extract the gas, etc.), you’ll get 400 million kilowatt hours of electricity over 30 years! Natgas yields 8 times as much electricity per dollar as wind, and 16 times as much as solar.
Who regulates what when it comes to the federal government and the oil and gas industry? We have an alphabet soup of federal agencies and agencies within agencies that regulate some aspects of drilling (on federal lands), pipelines, and by extension (because of air emissions) compressor stations, trucking and more when it comes to our industry. We recently spotted a helpful article that gives a high-level overview of who is regulating what. It’ll make your head spin! And this is just at the federal level. Add to this each state with its own regulatory fiefdoms and it’s a miracle any drilling ever happens.
The “best of the rest”–stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading: Pa. House and Senate remain in Republican control despite Democrat gains; New Jersey-based design and engineering firm to open office in Canonsburg; LANTA hopes to add even more compressed natural gas buses to fleet; Cabot and Williams on an education adventure with small schools; Voters reject oil well setbacks as Colorado’s Proposition 112 defeated; Naperville council expected to OK plan for new compressed natural gas filling station on city land; NYMEX December natural gas spikes 28.3 cents to $3.567/MMBtu on forecast for early-season cold snap; US EIA boosts Q4 gas marketed production forecast by 1.83 Bcf/d to 94.32 Bcf/d; US transportation sector used 43.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas for vehicle fuel in 2017; China to boost shale oil, gas production; The world can live without Iranian oil; Oil markets yawn as Iran sanctions come into effect; Oil and gas firms sound alarm as capital once destined for Canada flees to more competitive U.S.; China’s gas pipelines on wheels.