OH Judge Rules in Favor of NEXUS Survey, Ticks Off the CORNballs
On Tuesday a Medina County, OH judge ruled that the NEXUS pipeline does have a right to enter private land to survey it for possible routes for the pipeline. The judge said Ohio laws allow private companies to survey land for eventual appropriation (including eminent domain) as long as the company can prove it is an energy or utility company. The judge said the law is quite clear on that point–plain and simple to understand. The judge’s decision didn’t sit too well with the CORNballs of CORN (Coalition to Reroute Nexus pipeline). We’ve written plenty about CORN and their effort to “reroute” the NEXUS (see our CORN stories here). Although the group states their aim is to reroute the NEXUS away from northern counties in Ohio, what they’re really trying to do is simply stop the pipeline altogether. Every legal and political maneuver they’ve tried has failed. But that doesn’t deter the CORN faithful. They’re baaaack! This time the CORNballs are taking their fight to the state legislature, hoping they can get a law passed favorable to their cause…
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In September MDN told you that the 711-mile ET Rover Pipeline, costing an estimated $3.7 billion to build, had awarded a contract to an Ohio company to build 39 compressor stations (see 
FirstEnergy Corp., an electric utility operating in the Appalachian region, announced yesterday they will construct a new substation near Smithfield, WV along with a new two-mile transmission line–in order to send more electricity to a nearby natural gas processing plant. FirstEnergy is spending $63 million to build the new substation and transmission line. The announcement doesn’t name the owner of the natgas processing plant, but we have a guess…
In July MDN reported that GreenHunter Resources–the water resource, waste management, and environmental services subsidiary of Magnum Hunter Resources in the Marcellus/Utica–had brought two new wastewater injection wells online at their Mills Hunter facility in Meigs County, OH (see 
MDN’s Jim Willis comes from the marketing world having held marketing positions at various publishing companies over the past 25 years or so. Sometimes (like you) Jim wants to pull his remaining hair out when reading press releases larded up with tech and marketing speak. Just say it in plain English, please! We came across such a press release from GE–as in General Electric. We waded through a tangle of “optimized compression” and “asset level” and “condition-based” phraseology to bring you this news: Crestwood Midstream is using new software from GE that will improve the compressor stations they operate in WV, allowing Crestwood to move more gas using the same equipment. There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Why can’t marketing types learn the lesson that simple language is better!…
In September MDN brought you the news that the buyer of the bankrupt Canadian waterless fracking company, GASFRAC, is shelving the waterless propane fracking product the company was known for (see 
Yes, it takes years from the first announcement of a new pipeline project until it’s done and “in service.” In October 2012 MDN told you about a new project from then NiSource and it’s Columbia Pipeline subsidiary called the East Side Expansion (see 
A Pennsylvania state judge last Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit by three Cumberland County landowners against Sunoco Logistics Partners over the company’s assertion of eminent domain to build the Mariner East 2 pipeline across their property. Sunoco is currently pumping propane through the Mainer East 1 pipeline and has plans to add a second and third pipeline next to the existing pipeline, collectively called Mariner East 2. All told, Sunoco LP is spending an eye-popping $3 billion to build out the Mariner East project which flows natural gas liquids (propane, ethane, others) from as far away as eastern Ohio to the Philadelphia-area Marcus Hook refinery. The judge, in tossing out the lawsuit, further strengthens Sunoco LP’s argument that the Mariner projects, which will distribute the NGLs flowing through them both within PA and beyond PA, is in fact a public utility under PA law and entitled to use eminent domain, if necessary, to build the project…
Dominion is a huge utility/pipeline company operating in 13 states and organized into multiple corporations–but all under the broad umbrella known as Dominion. One of the pieces of the company is called Dominion Transmission, Inc. (DTI)–the interstate and gathering pipeline segment of the company, headquartered in Richmond, VA. Dominion has just announced they will strip out the gathering pipeline bits of the business from DTI and put them into a new company (on paper) called Dominion Gathering & Processing, Inc. It also appears that DTI itself will be renamed to Dominion Resources, Inc. The value of the transaction (what Dominion will essentially pay itself) is $434 million for the gathering assets. Why all of the musical chairs and setting up new corporations on paper? This time it doesn’t appear to be about tax advantages, as it so often is. Dominion is making the change because gathering systems are not regulated under FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) rules the way interstate pipelines are. By unbundling the gathering pipelines/compressor plants/etc. from the company that operates the interstate pipeline, Dominion can better compete with others in the midstream space. That is, right now because the gathering assets are part of the same company as the interstate pipeline, those assets are subject to FERC regulatory hoops and nonsense–so Dominion is removing those assets from that nonsense–sort of untying their hands to be on a level playing field with others…
It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything about Pennant Midstream, a joint venture between Columbia Pipeline Group and Hilcorp’s midstream subsidiary Harvest Pipeline Company with assets located mostly in the Mahoning Valley area of Ohio. Columbia, the lead jv partner, announced today that Williams (currently being bought out by Energy Transfer Equity) will become the third partner in the jv. Williams will have an initial 5% ownership share, although it’s not clear to us how much they’ve initially invested for that 5%. However, should Williams want to pony up cash for expansions to the system, they can achieve a full one-third ownership in time. Here’s the announcement with the details Columbia has decided to share…
Since March MDN has been watching the active number of rigs operated by Patterson-UTI Energy as a proxy for whether or not we’ve “turned the corner” on falling rig counts in the Marcellus/Utica. Patterson is a major drilling contractor with operations in the Marcellus/Utica region. We won’t recount all of the numbers here, for that you can read our story from August (see 
It’s kind of funny to hear anti-drilling liberal NPR reporters interview each other and present it as news. Hilarious, in fact. They do their dead-level best to sound objective (which they aren’t) and knowledgeable (which they sometimes are) and haughty (which they always are). Here’s what precipitated the latest round of self-interviews. In July, MDN told you that the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission (PUC) had given preliminary approval to Liberty Utilities (a NH utility company) to purchase firm capacity on Kinder Morgan’s proposed Northeast Energy Direct extension of the Tennessee Gas Pipeline (see 
One reason why it takes so long to build a pipeline is the litigation necessary to make it happen. In September 2014, Dominion committed full force to building a 550-mile, $5 billion natural gas pipeline that will run from West Virginia, through Virginia and into North Carolina (see 
EQT and NextEra US Gas Assets plan to build the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a 330-mile pipeline from Wetzel County, WV to the Transco Pipeline in Pittsylvania County, VA. There’s been plenty of pushback from landowners who won’t allow MVP access to survey (see 
Kinder Morgan continues to fight an uphill battle to get its Northeast Energy Direct (NED) pipeline project accepted and approved. In March MDN noticed that Kinder had failed to sign up any new customers in the previous eight month period, with commitments remaining at 500,000 dekatherms per day, equivalent to 1/2 Bcf/d (see