New York State is the biggest loser. In every sense. NG Advantage, which once tried to set up a virtual pipeline operation in the Town of Fenton (suburb of Binghamton, NY), has shaken the dust of New York off its shoes and has, instead, decided to build the facility (with millions in tax revenues and over 100 jobs) 25 miles across the border in Springville Township, Susquehanna County, PA–in the heart of Marcellus country. Good for NG! Nice people, and they deserved much better treatment than they got here in NY. We personally hoped and lobbied for NG to locate in the Town of Windsor, NY, where MDN is located. But alas, the experience they had with the Town of Fenton was so nasty, they decided to abandon any plans of locating a business in NY. Can’t say that we blame them. NY is about the most business unfriendly state in the Union.
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Category: CNG/LNG
Philly OKs $60M Plan to Partner with Russian re LNG Export Plant
Russian native Boris Brevnov, a former Enron executive, and banker Charles Ryan, a Radnor native who was once chief country officer in Moscow for Deutsche Bank, have just landed themselves a sweetheart deal with Philadelphia Gas Works to build a small LNG plant that will export Marcellus gas. The Philadelphia Gas Commission voted to approve a deal yesterday with Liberty Energy Trust. We frankly have mixed emotions about the news. We’re glad to see another LNG export facility, this one in PA (albeit quite small), but unhappy that these particular people are the ones building and operating it. Yes, there’s a lot of history to cover in this story.
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Elba Island LNG Key for Kinder Morgan Profits in 2019
Yesterday Kinder Morgan, one of (perhaps THE) country’s largest midstream company, issued guidance (their best guess) for how much money the company will make in 2019. Aimed at investors, of course. Usually these types of things are dry as toast, but we happened to notice the third sentence in the update which says Elba Island, Kinder’s LNG export facility on the coast of Georgia, along with the Gulf Coast Express pipeline project, will both enter service in 2019 and will help lead the company to record revenue–about 10% more revenue next year than was generated this year. Which got us to thinking once again about Elba Island, and the Marcellus molecules that will get exported from it. It also reminded us of a recent email exchange we had with a subscriber who swears that LNG shipments are already departing from the facility.
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New Fortress Energy Building Second PA LNG Export Facility
Earlier this month MDN brought you the exciting news that New Fortress Energy (NFE) is planning to build an LNG (liquefied natural gas) liquefaction plant in Wyalusing (Bradford County), PA in order to export Marcellus gas (see Big News! Marcellus LNG Export Plant Coming to Landlocked NEPA). The $800 million plant will supercool and liquefy locally extracted Marcellus Shale gas and ship it first by truck, eventually by rail, to “customers in the U.S. as well as abroad.” NFE recently filed a Securities and Exchange Commission document called an S-1. In that filing, we learn some dynamite news: NFE is working on a *second* Pennsylvania LNG facility! Not only that, but they have plans to build another 5-10 such facilities over the next five years–although we don’t know if all of those will be in the Marcellus/Utica. Something else we learned in the S-1 is how NFE plans to export the LNG they produce in Wyalusing to other countries.
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FERC Grants Favorable EIS to Jacksonville, FL LNG Export Facility
Is there a connection between a new LNG export facility on the East Coast, all the way down in Jacksonville, Florida, and the Marcellus/Utica? Indeed there is! In January 2017, Eagle LNG filed an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to build a new LNG export facility at a site on the St. Johns River in Jacksonville. The LNG produced at the facility will be transported to markets in the Caribbean and Latin America for power generation, and also delivered to local and regional markets, including marine bunkering and high horsepower applications–LNG used right here at home. Last Friday FERC issued a favorable draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for the project, which means FERC plans to grant final approval. Below we connect the dots for how Marcellus/Utica gas will be some of the gas feeding this new plant.
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B&V 2019 Natural Gas Report: LNG Ramps Up, More Infra. Needed
The annual Black & Veatch “Strategic Directions: Natural Gas Report” (full copy below) explores the complexities and market dynamics impacting today’s natural gas landscape. As the world continues to invest in the adoption of so-called renewable energy options, the outlook for natural gas has never been more positive. You read that right! More renewables = more investment in natural gas. Shifts in the global energy market are influencing gas production and transportation, altering the volume of supply. Developers, who know a good opportunity when they see it, are investing heavily in liquefied natural gas (LNG) and liquefaction capacity. But more infrastructure and pipeline capacity will be needed to continue to support the growth in LNG, especially as Asian markets continue to migrate away from coal in an effort to meet environmental goals. This report explores how complex geopolitics will impact upstream, midstream and downstream operations, while global forces reshape the industry across the board.
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Marcellus LNG Export Plant in NEPA Will Generate Lots of Traffic
Last week MDN brought you the exciting news that New Fortress Energy is planning to build an LNG (liquefied natural gas) liquefaction plant in Wyalusing (Bradford County), PA (see Big News! Marcellus LNG Export Plant Coming to Landlocked NEPA). The $800 million plant will supercool and liquefy locally extracted Marcellus Shale gas and ship it first by truck, eventually by rail, to “customers in the U.S. as well as abroad.” The plant received initial blessing from the Wyalusing Town Planning Commission last week. But not all is butterflies and unicorns. At a planning commission meeting, a New Fortress Energy official revealed that the plant will generate 10-15 tractor trailer trips per hour–24/7/365. That’s a truck turning in to the facility once every 4-6 minutes–call it an average of one every 5 minutes.
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PA DEP Spends $2.6M for “Clean Energy Vehicles” – Mostly NatGas
It must really grate on Big Green supporters that their hero, lib Dem Tom Wolf (who just won reelection as governor of PA), continues to support fossil fuel projects. It must doubly grate on them that Wolf’s Dept. of Environmental Protection, when funding such projects, calls them “clean energy.” We love it! The PA DEP announced yesterday, two days after the big election, that they’ve just awarded $2.6 million in grants to 16 different “clean energy vehicle” projects. When you look at the list, all but $32,077 of that amount is going to fund either CNG or propane-powered vehicles. That is, fossil fuel-powered vehicles (mostly buses and trucks). And the DEP has the *audacity* (in the opinion of Big Green nuts) to call all of these projects “clean energy”! We’re laughing our considerable rear-end off.
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Big News! Marcellus LNG Export Plant Coming to Landlocked NEPA
We have some exciting news to share. A company called New Fortress Energy is planning to build an LNG (liquefied natural gas) liquefaction plant in Wyalusing (Bradford County), PA. The $800 million (!) plant will supercool and liquefy locally extracted Marcellus Shale gas and ship it first by truck, eventually by rail, to “customers in the U.S. as well as abroad.” Meaning exports. How cool is that? It seems that LNG liquefaction plants no longer have to be located along a shoreline to engage in exports. Which company will provide the gas to liquefy and export? MDN has the exclusive answer, and yes, you need to be an MDN paying subscriber to find out…
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LNG Liquefaction Plant May be Coming to Central Massachusetts
As it happens, this is the second LNG liquefaction plant story that landed on our desk today. Northeast Energy Center, backed by Liberty Energy and NorthStar Industries, is proposing to build an LNG liquefaction plant in central Massachusetts. Our other LNG plant story today (see Big News! Marcellus LNG Export Plant Coming to Landlocked NEPA) makes sense to us because that plant is located in the middle of a rich Marcellus gas region in northeast Pennsylvania. But building an LNG plant in the middle of Massachusetts, far from low-cost gas supplies? What gives?
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First “Big” Chinese Energy Investment in WV is…Software?
It’s been exactly one year since the announcement and signing of a memorandum of understanding between China and the State of West Virginia, whereby China pledged to spend (over 20 years) an incomprehensible $83.7 billion (with a “b”) on petrochemical and shale projects (see China Agrees to Invest Amazing $83.7 BILLION in WV Shale, Petchem). How much money has China actually invested in WV to date? NOTHING. ZERO. NADA. That is, until now. Maybe. We came across a story about a WV company, TMC Technologies, working closely with China to develop software that will keep LNG exports heading to China, safe.
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Phila. Gas Works Public Advocate Endorses LNG Export Plan
In September, MDN told you that Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW), the country’s largest municipal-owned utility company, floated a plan to partner with a private company to build a new LNG export facility at its Passyunk Plant located in south Philly (see Phila. Gas Works Floats New Plan for LNG Export Facility). One of the first steps in making such a plan a reality is to run it by the PGW “consumer advocate”–an group appointed to be the voice of consumers as a check on decisions made by PGW management. The consumer advocate has just spoken–and likes the LNG plan!
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FERC Issues Final Approval for Rhode Island LNG Plant
In June, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a favorable environmental assessment for a plan by utility company National Grid to build a teeny tiny LNG liquefaction plant in Providence, Rhode Island (see FERC Issues Favorable Enviro Assessment for Rhode Island LNG Plant). The Fields Point LNG plant, facing stiff opposition from a group of RI House and Senate members, will cost $180 million to build. The plant will liquefy 20 million cubic feet (MMcf) of natural gas per day and store it. Good news: earlier this week FERC granted final approval for the project.
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Elba Island, Ga. LNG Export Startup Delayed (Again) – Now 1Q19
The East Coast’s second LNG export plant to come online, after Cove Point in Maryland, will be Elba Island in Georgia. In July, Kinder Morgan, the builder and primary sponsor of the project, pushed back startup for the plant from the third until fourth quarter of this year (see Elba Island, Ga. LNG Export Startup Delayed to 4Q18). In what appears to be a pattern, Kinder has just delayed startup again–now estimated to be first quarter of next year.
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Cove Point LNG Plant Restarts After 3 Wks Offline for Maintenance
On September 21, Dominion Energy stopped pulling gas from pipelines into the Cove Point LNG export facility (on the shoreline of Maryland) in order to conduct scheduled maintenance (see Cove Point LNG Plant Down for 3 Weeks of Maintenance). Cove Point liquefies and exports some 3/4 of a billion cubic feet (Bcf) each day. True to their word, over the weekend (three weeks later) Dominion began pulling gas again. By the way, all of the gas feeding Cove Point comes from the Marcellus/Utica region–most of it headed to Japan and India.
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Con Ed Plans 2-5 CNG/LNG Storage Facilities in Westchester County
Only in New York. Utility company Con Edison is proposing to build up to five compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG) storage sites in Westchester County, NY–to increase the local supply of natgas available for customers. Con Ed wants to invest in “renewable” natural gas and “offer new incentives for Westchester customers who upgrade their heating equipment or install heat pumps to reduce natural gas usage.”
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