Cove Point LNG Now 78% Complete, On Track to Open This Year
In October 2014 Dominion announced they had officially broken ground on the Cove Point LNG export plant, a project that will inject between $3.4 and $3.8 billion in Calvert County, Maryland and pump upward of 1.8 billion cubic feet per day of cheap, abundant Marcellus and Utica Shale gas (see Dominion Breaks Ground on Cove Point, MD LNG Export Facility). Anti-drilling zealots have been desperate to stop the facility in a vain attempt to stop “fracked gas.” The Sierra Club, among others, has repeatedly launched frivolous lawsuits. They’ve all failed. Dominion released a video update (below) that shows the facility is now 78% complete and “on track for an in-service date in late 2017.” There are currently 1,800 construction workers on site. All of the concrete has been poured, the sound wall is finished, and more than 50% of the steel has been installed for this project. Some 31 of the 34 barge loads have been received and 68 of the 77 heavy haul deliveries have been transported. It is all systems “go” for this project…
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In Oct. 2015 MDN reported a story about International Paper’s Ticonderoga mill in northern New York, near the Vermont border (see 
The United States is already on the cusp of energy independence, thanks to the shale revolution. What does that mean? It means when you consider how much energy we produce and export, and how much we consume and import, at the end of the day, we are producing as much energy as we consume. But it gets complicated. We still import a lot of oil from the Middle East and elsewhere. We import (and export) oil via pipelines to Canada. We also still import natural gas. But at some point the U.S. will export more than it imports. That is, we won’t only produce as much as we consume, we’ll produce extra energy–and sell it abroad to other countries. We will become a “net exporter.” When will that happen? According our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), it will happen in the next 10 years–or less. The EIA has just released its “Annual Energy Outlook 2017” (full copy below). In the report the number crunchers at EIA look at multiple scenarios and conclude that under most scenarios we are a net exporter by 2026, and in some of those scenarios, it happens even sooner. That would be the first time since 1953 that our country has exported more energy than it uses. Not surprisingly, LNG (liquefied natural gas) plays a critical role in our country becoming a net exporter. Here’s what the EIA said in releasing the 2017 annual report…
In March of this year, MDN told you that LNG Limited (from Australia) registered with the Canadian government for an environmental assessment for a pipeline they want to build in Nova Scotia–the Bear Paw Pipeline (see 
Seems like GE Oil & Gas is putting its fingers in every U.S. o&g pie it can. In October GE announced it would pursue Baker Hughes for a merger/buyout (see 
Each month the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy issues a report on LNG exports and imports. We check in on the report from time to time. This month’s report (with data through September) is particularly interesting. It shows the rapid scale-up of Cheniere’s Sabine Pass export facility on the coast of Louisiana. Sabine Pass is exporting U.S. shale gas, including some Marcellus/Utica gas, which is why we are interested in the LNG story. November is predicted to set a new record on the export of U.S. shale gas from Sabine. The LNG import picture, increasingly small, is also interesting and instructive. All of the LNG coming into the U.S. (via ship, not via pipeline from Canada) this year has come from one country: Trinidad. And there is a single import terminal that receives almost all incoming, non-pipeline LNG: Everett, MA (near Boston). Which is why GDF Suez, the operator, has been agitating against new pipelines to New England (shame on them)…
In December 2014 the Massachusetts-based utility Berkshire Gas Company announced the amount of natural gas they could purchase from the Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP) was at full capacity. There’s no additional gas supplies to buy–unless TGP builds their Northeast Energy Direct (NED) expansion project. So Berkshire was forced to tell new customers for natural gas in portions of Franklin County they won’t be able to tap into Berkshire’s line (see 
The Sierra Club, which may have been founded for good reasons, long ago left the realm of sanity. Sierra Clubbers, as we call them, now live in an alternative universe where clean-burning natural gas and all fossil fuels are from the devil himself. The Clubbers have tried to get multiple LNG (liquefied natural gas) export facilities blocked on the theory that if you cut off the demand you can cut off the supply (i.e. end fracking of new wells). Yeah, crazy. But that’s what they’re trying. Lately they’ve tried to attack and bully both the Dept. of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. With legions of lawyers, they file frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit, hoping if they throw enough legal (ahem) feces against the wall, some it will stick. So far it hasn’t. One of the facilities the Sierra Club continues to fight against is Cove Point LNG in Maryland. They filed an appeal of a Dept. of Energy approval to allow Cove Point to export LNG to non-free trade agreement countries–namely Japan and India. Yep, the Sierra Club doesn’t want us to help out Japan or India. They’d rather have us help Saudi Arabia and Qatar, apparently. After the appeal went nowhere, the Clubbers have no sued in the uber-liberal D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Thing is, that very same court recently handed the Sierra Club a defeat in a similar case…
We spotted an announcement that American Electric Technologies, Inc. (AETI) has won a contract to “provide a turnkey power delivery solution for a new Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) liquefaction plant under construction” in New England. Well that caught our attention. Where is this new LNG liquefaction plant located? The announcement does not say. However, we have a guess…
One of the largest banks in the world (#11) is the German-based Deutsche Bank. They have major branches in dozens of countries, including the U.S. The Equity Research – North America operation of Deutsche Bank attended the Platts 9th Annual Appalachian Oil & Gas Conference in Pittsburgh earlier this week. The DB analyst who attended wrote up notes and shared them. We found the writeup interesting and thought you would too…