Pipeline Giant Williams Making Moves into LNG Marketing
The ace reporters at Reuters have sussed out another inside exclusive: Williams, the pipeline giant, has hired “two veteran executives” to help the company set up an LNG marketing operation. The operation will put Williams into direct competition with other big LNG marketers including Cheniere Energy, Shell, and QatarEnergy. The big question is this: How successful will this effort be if Williams doesn’t actually own an LNG export terminal of its own?
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Another genius move by Diversified Energy (formerly Diversified Gas & Oil). Diversified owns close to 8 million acres of leases with some 67,000 (mostly) conventional oil and gas wells. Most of Diversified’s assets are located in the Appalachian region. With that many old oil and gas wells, the company ends up plugging a number of them each year. In the past, one of the vendors Diversified has used to plug old wells is Next LVL Energy, headquartered in the Pittsburgh area. Diversified announced yesterday it is buying Next LVL.
Most of our coverage about pipelines is for large interstate pipelines, or perhaps large regional gathering pipeline systems. Every now and again we’ll bring you news about a “last mile” LDC (local distribution company) pipeline–the pipes utility companies install and maintain to run gas to homes and businesses. We have a story of that sort for you today. Dominion Energy, a huge utility company that used to be in the pipeline business (but sold its pipeline business to Warren Buffett a few years ago) wants to install a new 760-foot pipeline under the Blue Ridge Parkway (managed by the National Park Service) in North Carolina.
In late 2015 MPLX (i.e. Marathon Petroleum) bought out and merged in the Utica Shale’s premier midstream company, MarkWest Energy, for $15 billion (see 
Evolution Well Services, headquartered in Houston with a regional office in Pittsburgh, specializes in “electric” fracking–using natural gas from the well pad (instead of diesel fuel) to power turbines to create electricity that drives fracking pumps. In September 2020, three former Evolution employees who worked at remote sites in the Marcellus/Utica for the company, filed a lawsuit against the company claiming Evolution failed to pay them for their commute to and from job sites. This past Tuesday a federal judge in Pennsylvania granted conditional certification for the lawsuit to become a class action.
Once again Pennsylvania’s Attorney General, Josh Shapiro, is turning accidents, including an accident that caused an explosion of the newly completed 
We can’t resist a good railroad story. We’ve always loved them (we know, we’re weird). Here’s a good railroad story for you: Frack sand company Smart Sand, Inc., headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas, has just opened for business and is shipping frack sand to a brand new transloading facility in Waynesburg (Greene County), Pennsylvania.
Anecdotally in reading articles about electric power production in New England, we know that almost all electricity is produced in the region by natural gas (unless they run low, then they use fuel oil). We also know a majority of the electricity produced in the PJM region, including the M-U area, is also produced by natural gas. What we didn’t know (but do now) is that the vast majority of electricity in the southeastern U.S. is produced by natural gas. Most of the molecules feeding southeast gas plants come from the M-U.
A month ago MDN brought you the news that UGI Corporation, one of Pennsylvania’s largest natural gas utility companies, had cut a deal to buy the Stonehenge Appalachia Midstream natural gas gathering system in Butler County, PA, for $190 million (see 
This one doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for us. Late last year utility giant Consolidated Edison (ConEd) colluded with and supported the efforts of radicalized leftists in New York City to vote through a ban on new natural gas hookups starting next year (see