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Dominion Says Their Pipelines Gather 80% of All Ohio Natural Gas
The Guernsey County Energy Coalition heard from utility and midstream giant Dominion last week at their regular meeting in Cambridge, OH. Mack Smith Jr., Dominion’s manager of commercial gas services, had some fascinating things to say. One of them was this: “Dominion gathers about 80 percent of all Ohio gas and interconnects with seven major pipelines to distribute gas to markets, and to sell storage services to marketers and end users.” Did you know that Dominion gathers 80% of all Ohio natural gas? We sure didn’t! Here’s some more pickings from what Smith said last Thursday…
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We have two big pieces of news to share with you today about the Cove Point, Maryland LNG export facility being built by Dominion. The first is that yesterday, after a years-long process, the Obama Dept. of Energy finally gave Dominion their final stamp of approval to build the facility. Last month we pointed out this last piece of the puzzle still had not fallen into place (see 
Yesterday Dominion, a huge natural gas and electric utility as well as a midstream company, announced plans to build the State of Virginia’s largest natural gas powered electric generating plant–in Greensville County, VA. (By the way, Dominion won the Award for Excellence in Corporate Social Responsibility at the Northeast Oil & Gas Awards on Wednesday in Pittsburgh. Well done!) The $1 billion project will produce 1,600 megawatts of electricity using combined-cycle technology–enough electricity to power 400,000 homes. Dominion will use Marcellus Shale gas to power the plant, provided by Williams’ Transco pipeline. The plant will also be fed by a second Marcellus Shale pipeline–Dominion’s own Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a $5 billion, 550-mile pipeline slated to run from West Virginia through Virginia and into to North Carolina (see 
Dominion hosted a party yesterday and anti-drillers weren’t invited. Dominion’s party sported the Japanese ambassador the U.S., Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and other dignitaries–international, state and local–to celebrate the fact that the Cove Point LNG export facility is now under construction. Japan and India have together spoken for 100% of all the natural gas that can be liquefied and pumped through the new facility once it’s built and begins operations in 2017 (see 
Here’s one weird and twisted bedtime story: Once upon a time there was a filthy Big Tobacco company. Big Tobacco hooked up with a wealthy (and equally filthy) Big Oil company and they had a baby. And the baby was…….solar panels?? Yep. Philip Morris, one of the largest cigarette manufacturers in the world has contracted with Dominion, one of the biggest utility/midstream companies in the Marcellus/Utica region, to install 8,000 solar panels at the Philip Morris facility in Chesterfield County, VA so they can make more cigs. It will be the largest solar installation to date in the state of Virginia. The only problem here is that the “bad guys” (Big Tobacco and Big Oil) are the heroes by installing solar instead of using natural gas. This is a real dilemma for the anti-drilling/anti-pipeline gang in the Old Dominion State. It may cause a brain hemorrhage…
By most measures, Dominion Transmission’s New Market Project is a fairly dull $159 million capacity upgrade to an existing natural gas pipeline which runs across upstate New York from the PA line, west of Horseheads, northeasterly to the state’s Capital Region (see the map below). We are now about a month away from the originally forecast April 2015 date when Dominion thought it might get a green light from FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Docket Number CP14-497). September 2015 was originally forecast for beginning construction (280 jobs, all temporary, as are all construction jobs), while November 2016 was the target in-service date (adding 10 to 12 permanent jobs, running forward)…
Here on Pandora where the forests are sentient and can think and feel…oh wait, that’s in the movie Avatar and the sequel is not due out until the end of 2017 (drats!). We live on Mother Earth, not on Pandora. But you wouldn’t know it by the reaction of anti-drillers at the prospect of running Dominion’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline through 17 miles of the Monongahela National Forest. You’d swear the forest can actually feel it–and would experience a catastrophic wound in its very soul…