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FERC Sides with Energy Transfer Against Chesapeake re Pipe Contract
On Sunday, June 28, Chesapeake Energy, with major operations in the northeast Pennsylvania Marcellus, filed for bankruptcy (see Chesapeake Files for Bankruptcy – Debtors to Take Ownership). As part of the filing, the company asked the bankruptcy court to allow it to break existing, legal, enforceable contracts with several pipeline companies, including Energy Transfer’s Tiger Pipeline (see Chesapeake Asks Court to Break Pipeline Contracts, Including M-U). The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is siding with Energy Transfer against Chessy.
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Pssst. Hey buddy. Ya wanna buy an LNG cargo. Or three? Dominion’s Cove Point LNG export facility along the coast of Maryland liquefies and exports Marcellus Shale gas. Dominion has two customers who buy all of the LNG the facility can produce: Japan and India. GAIL, formerly known as Gas Authority of India Ltd., is looking to sell three upcoming LNG cargoes instead of shipping them all the way to India.
Sunoco Logistics Partners (i.e. Energy Transfer) was drilling horizontally underneath Snitz Creek in Lebanon County, PA for its Mariner East 2 Pipeline project when it experienced yet another “inadvertent return”–nontoxic drilling mud leaking out of a place where it shouldn’t. In 2018 the same thing happened and antis blew a gasket over a “spill” of five gallons (see 
Anti-fossil fuelers, like those who write for and edit the Scranton Times-Tribune, are still spitting and sputtering that an $800 million LNG liquefaction plant is going to get built in nearby Bradford County and that LNG from that plant is going to roll through the Scranton area on both rail cars *and* on trucks. New Fortress Energy is building the project, currently on pause until early next year (see 
And that’s that! The first of 10 LNG (liquefied natural gas) mini-trains at Kinder Morgan’s Elba Island, Georgia export facility went online in December of last year (see 
We’ll ask the question no one else dares to ask publicly: How many more Ohio legislators are in the back pocket of FirstEnergy (i.e. Energy Harbor), guilty of taking part in an alleged $60 million bribery scandal that paid politicians to ensure Energy Harbor would get $1.1 billion of ratepayers’ money to prop up their economically failing nuclear power plants? It sure seems like there may be other Ohio legislators who have been paid off too, given their unwillingness to support the effort to overturn House Bill (HB) 6 and end the gravy train for Energy Harbor.
It’s been an uphill battle to complete Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a 303-mile Marcellus/Utica gas pipeline from Wetzel County, WV to Pittsylvania County, VA. The project has been vigorously opposed by radical environmentalists from the beginning. Frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit has been filed by Big Green groups bankrolled by billionaires. Finally in June Equitrans, the builder, said they should be able to complete the 92% done pipeline by next spring (see 
Yesterday MDN told you that Range Resources is planning to operate at net-zero carbon within the next five years, by 2025 (see 
Democrats are nothing if not creative. A leftist Democrat in the Virginia legislature, Del. Chris Hurst (Montgomery County) has introduced a bill to try and kill the remaining construction of the 92% complete Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP). Dems couldn’t stop the project in the courts. They couldn’t stop it with nutjobs living in the tops of trees for months on end. They couldn’t get lefty Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam to stop it. So now they’re trying this: A bill that would require *any* company hiring a crew of 50 or more “temporary” workers during the COVID-19 pandemic to receive prior approval from the Democrat Commissioner of Dept. of Labor and Industry first.
On August 24, 31 radicalized Big Green groups from across Pennsylvania sent a letter to the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary Pat McDonnell demanding (they always demand) the DEP immediately and permanently revoke all Mariner East construction permits and prohibit the issuance of any future permits. Yeah, just stop the pipeline, which is about 98% done, from ever getting completed. What else can you say except it’s demented? Nobody in their right mind would reasonably request or expect the DEP to simply stop the project permanently.
A group of far-left, so-called environmental groups, including, Earthjustice, Buckeye Environmental Network, Concerned Ohio River Residents, Freshwater Accountability Project, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and the Sierra Club, are suing the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) in an attempt to overturn permits issued by ODNR to build an underground NGL storage hub in Monroe County, Ohio.
While drilling in Chester County in the Marsh Creek State Park two weeks ago, Energy Transfer’s Mariner East 2X pipeline experienced an “inadvertent return”–nontoxic drilling mud coming up out of the ground where it’s not supposed to (see 
Eureka Resources, which operates three frack wastewater treatment facilities in the Marcellus Shale, is doing some really cool stuff. Last October the company began extracting lithium from Marcellus wastewater at one of its plants in Bradford County, PA (see 
FirstEnergy Solutions (now called Energy Harbor) allegedly paid $60 million in bribes to (now former) Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and four of his associates to gain their assistance in passing the hugely unpopular House Bill 6 (see