Hooray! WV Fights Back, State Drops Investments with BlackRock Fund
Three cheers for West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore! Yesterday Moore announced the WV Board of Treasury Investments, which manages the state’s roughly $8 billion operating funds, will no longer use BlackRock Inc. investment funds as part of its banking transactions. WV is divesting from the divestors. BlackRock is part of a leftist (very political) group aggressively trying to defund all oil and gas companies (see Investors Representing Half the World’s Wealth Go Mad re Net-Zero). Now it’s time to choose sides and to defund the defunders–to divest the divestors. Moore just fired the first shot. It’s already causing headaches for BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
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EQT Corporation, the largest natural gas producer in the United States, announced last Friday that all of its natural gas produced in Washington and Greene counties in Pennsylvania (the majority of its production, some 4 Bcf/d) is now officially certified as “responsibly produced” gas by two different certification organizations: Equitable Origin and MiQ. That 4 Bcf/d of certified gas represents 4.5% of all natural gas produced in the U.S.
S&P Global Platts Analytics is reporting natural gas production in the Marcellus/Utica (which they call Appalachia) has “tumbled.” After reaching a record-high 34.8 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) in late December, Appalachia gas production fell to an estimated 33.3 Bcf/d on Jan. 14 (down 4%). The drop in production has caused the price of gas at regional trading hubs like Eastern Gas South (formerly Dominion South) to jump. Eastern Gas South is up 34 cents from the beginning of January.
NextLVL Energy, a Pittsburgh-based well plugging company, was founded by several former EQT Corporation executives following the change in power when the Rice boys took over at EQT. The company was formed to tackle the thorny issue of plugging old and abandoned oil and gas wells (mostly conventional wells). Pennsylvania alone has over 200,000 abandoned and orphaned O&G wells according to some estimates. NextLVL was a prescient move by the former EQT execs. Nearly $400 million from Biden’s infrastructure bill is heading to PA alone over the next 10 years for the specific purpose of plugging old wells.
Two days ago New England generated 24% (a quarter) of the electricity it needs by burning…fuel oil. Why? Low supplies of natural gas. How much electricity was generated by so-called renewables on the same day? According to ISO New England, only 8% of electricity on Jan. 16 was generated by renewables. However, if you take out burning garbage, burning wood, and burning natural gas from landfills (all included in the “renewables” number), just 2.5% of New England’s electricity came from solar and wind, what most people think of as renewable energy. Do you see the folly of dumping fossil energy anytime in the next 50-100 years?
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: MidCentral Energy expands northeast presence; NATIONAL: Trust is gone, institutions are corrupt, it’s now up to us; Democrats defeat GOP sanctions on Russian gas pipeline; For many carbon-capture projects, 45Q tax credit just isn’t enough; Arctic cold snap could push U.S. natural gas prices higher; Energy sector predictions for 2022; INTERNATIONAL: Global gas and LNG – 6 trends to watch in 2022; Russia’s Gazprom has no Europe gas exports planned in February via Yamal pipeline.