Black Gold: EOG Resources Drills Gushers in Ohio Utica
Perhaps our headline is slightly misleading. EOG is not the modern equivalent of Jed Clampett walking along and seeing crude bubbling up out of the ground (as in the fictional The Beverly Hillbillies show of the 1960s with the “Ballad of Jed Clampett” that says, “Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.”). What EOG and other Ohio drillers (like Encino Energy and Ascent Resources) have done is more like rocket science than winning a lottery. The oil has been locked away in the Utica/Point Pleasant shale layer for millennia. Aubrey McClendon, co-founder and former CEO of Chesapeake Energy, was the first to see the vision of freeing oil from the Utica.
Read More “Black Gold: EOG Resources Drills Gushers in Ohio Utica”
Whenever the government mandates which energy sources residents can and cannot use, residents lose. The government’s micromanaging of energy is a prescription for high prices and supply chain failures (i.e., blackouts). Yet leftists like Pennsylvania Rep. Danielle Friel Otten (a radical Democrat from the Philadelphia area) never seem to learn. She introduced a bill, House Bill (HB) 1467, that requires 30% of all electricity used in the state to come from unreliable renewables like wind and solar by the year 2030 — six short years from now. It is a prescription for massive failures in the power grid in the Keystone State.
Here’s the reality. People are moving out of states like New York due to high taxes and the stripping away of freedoms. Those of us living in NY now live in virtually a Communist state (and we’re not exaggerating). We can’t choose our energy sources. We can’t even use single-use plastic bags at the grocery store! NY has fallen. But NY’s mass exodus is the gain of states in the Southeastern U.S. Florida is the number one destination. Also high on the list are North Carolina and Georgia. With the increase in population, and the rapid influx of new business, and the push to convert automobiles to use electricity instead of gasoline, utility companies in the Southeast are asking (more like begging) for permission to build new natural gas power plants to meet all of the new demand for electricity. Of course, the extra gas somehow has to get to the plants.
Behind the Dominion Energy building in Hudson, Ohio, sits what’s being dubbed Hydrogen Heights. It’s a mini-village. The sign at the entrance says, “Welcome to Hydrogen Heights.” Dominion is testing the blending of hydrogen and methane on gas appliances there. We have nothing against using hydrogen as an energy source, other than it will never be able to power your home (see 
Dominion Energy wants to build a liquified natural gas (LNG) storage facility in Person County, North Carolina, to enhance natural gas service reliability for residential and business customers in the growing region (see 
The Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) is a group of natural gas exporting countries, including Qatar, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela — terrorist-supporting countries led by thugs and dictators. Whoops! A little too much honesty there? We don’t normally track the actions and statements of the GECF. However, the group holds more than two-thirds of the world’s gas supplies (so they say). So you can’t totally ignore them. The GECF is predicting a “tight” LNG market worldwide until at least 2026.
One of the most important “fathers of fracking” you’ve likely never heard of before, Claude Cooke, passed away on Jan. 17 at the ripe old age of 94. Cooke is best known as the guy who invented ceramic proppant (beads) used in fracking. He invented it while working for Exxon in the seventies. The innovation allowed for drilling wells that are deeper and hotter than previously possible. It helped revolutionize fracking, especially when fracking was later married to horizontal drilling by George Mitchell, who also died at the age of 94 (see 
NATIONAL: ExxonMobil takes to court to block activists’ agenda from ballot; It’s warmer because the sun’s flares are closer?; Biden weaponizing agencies in his war on American energy; INTERNATIONAL: Germany set for gas power plant expansion deal this week; USA and UK conduct more Houthi strikes; Edmund Burke and the folly of British climate “leadership.”