Dominion Needles Anti-Drillers by Throwing Party for Cove Point LNG
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 Dominion’s Cove Point LNG Facility Achieves Important Milestones). As near as we can tell this was a party just to have a party. That is, there was no particular portion of the project completed or other “milestone” reason to celebrate. They just wanted to celebrate and (judging from the language in the announcement below) needle anti-drillers (the “doubters” who said it couldn’t be done) to point out that Dominion has won–and they have lost–despite their best efforts to scuttle the project…
Read More “Dominion Needles Anti-Drillers by Throwing Party for Cove Point LNG”
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…
Just when you think you’ve heard it all, along comes another bizarre twist from those who oppose shale drilling. As we’ve reported in a number of stories, Dominion is planning to build a 550-mile, $5 billion natural gas pipeline from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina. It’s called the Atlantic Coast Pipeline project and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is now evaluating it (see