List of 10 Utica-Powered Electric Plant Projects Coming to Ohio
Note: Thanks to our trusty fact-checker, Jim has fixed a few numbers below. Had a wrong decimal!
Here’s an interesting number: 9,805. That’s how many megawatts of electricity will be produced each and every hour by Utica Shale-powered electric plants if 10 announced projects get built in Ohio. To put it in perspective, 9,805 megawatts is enough to power 9.8 million homes, if the power runs continuously. Ohio’s population is 11.5 million people living in 4.4 million households. Obviously the plants don’t run at full tilt 24/7/365. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported in 2015 that combined-cycle natgas electric plants ran at an average of 56.3% of the time. Where are we going with this? Those 10 plants, if they all get built, have the potential to use a maximum (24/7/365) of 98 million cubic feet (MMcf) of Utica Shale gas each and every hour. That’s about 0.1 billion cubic feet (Bcf) per hour. But let’s assume the plants all average running times of 56.3%. That’s still 55 MMcf/hour, 0.05 Bcf/hour. There are, last time we checked, 24 hours in a day, which means over the next several years, as these plants go online, these 10 electric plants alone will sop up a huge 1.2 Bcf of Utica gas per day. The Utica, right now, is producing something like 4.2 Bcf/d. Our point: electric generation is a very important new market for both Utica and Marcellus gas. Below is the list of the 10 natgas electric generation projects announced for Ohio, complete with name, location, megawatts produced and status of the project…
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In April 2016 MDN told you about the Guernsey Power Station–a new Utica/Marcellus natural gas-fired electric generating plant proposed for Guernsey County, OH (see 
In September MDN wrote about a new natural gas-fired electric plant being planned for Chesapeake, Virginia (see 
We’ve written plenty about President Obama’s so-called Clean Power Plan (CPP), introduced last summer, a plan to force electric generators to convert to using more “renewable” sources of energy–and less fossil fuels (see 
Natural gas and wind are the lowest-cost technology options for new electricity generation across much of the U.S. when cost, public health impacts and environmental effects are considered. So says a new research paper released by The University of Texas at Austin. Researchers assessed multiple generation technologies including coal, natural gas, solar, wind and nuclear. Their findings, as depicted in a series of maps illustrating the cost of each generation technology on a county-by-county basis throughout the U.S., are featured in a new white paper titled “New U.S. Power Costs: by County, with Environmental Externalities” (full copy below). What’s interesting to us is who helped fund the research. Two organizations helping pay the bill were the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation and the Environmental Defense Fund. That is, those with a bias against fossil fuels. We wonder if they’ll ask for their grant money back? Here’s a summary of the research, followed by the full report…
You hear a lot about wind these days, not so much about solar, as an alternative to nasty fossil fuels like natural gas. But is wind really “all that?” We spotted an Associated Press story bragging about “the nation’s first offshore wind farm” opening off the coast of Rhode Island. Deepwater Wind built five turbines producing 30 megawatts of electricity (enough electricity to power 17,000 homes) 3 miles off Block Island–at a cost of $300 million. That’s about $10 million per megawatt to construct the facility. Let’s compare that to building a natural gas-fired electric plant. Natgas plants cost about $1 million per megawatt (10x less). This past year the very first built-from-scratch natgas plant built to use Marcellus Shale gas, called Panda Liberty, went live (see 
FirstEnergy, based in Akron, OH, is one of the nation’s largest investor-owned electric systems, serving customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and New York. FirstEnergy owns a variety of regulated and non-regulated power generation plants. In November the company announced it wants to sell six power generating plants in PA, four of them natural gas-fired plants (see 
In June Talen Energy announced that one of its coal-burning electric generating plants, located in Montour County, PA, will get an upgrade to burn natural gas in addition to burning coal (see 
Contrary to the assurances of charlatans like Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey who tells us new natural gas pipelines are not needed, New England is once again looking down the throat of potential electricity shortages this winter–if we have another winter like that of 2013/2014. ISO New England Inc. (ISONE), the electrical grid operator in the region, issued a statement last week to say they are implementing a 2016-17 Winter Reliability Program to guard against potential electricity shortages because there’s not enough natural gas in the region to power electric plants if much of that gas is also heating homes and businesses on cold days. According to ISONE, “Electricity supplies should [not a reassuring word] be sufficient to meet consumer demand for electricity in New England this winter.” They then go on to say, “but constraints on the region’s natural gas pipelines could pose a challenge to reliable operations.” In other words, if it gets really cold and snowy, we’re screwed. So, to fend off that screwing, ISONE has devised a program to load up on oil, of all things, and LNG, to help produce electricity if natgas runs short. Don’t say we haven’t repeatedly warned New England that without new pipelines they will not only continue to pay 4x what everyone else pays for electricity, at some point there just won’t be enough fuel sources to produce electricity and sooner or later New England will have brownouts and/or rolling blackouts–because THEY’RE FOOLS and continue to reject safe, reliable natural gas pipelines…
Over the past two months Panda Power Funds has brought online the first two built-from-scratch-to-use-Marcellus-gas electric plants, both in northeast Pennsylvania (see 
In March 2015, Dominion–a huge natural gas and electric utility as well as a midstream company–announced plans to build the State of Virginia’s (indeed the country’s) largest natural gas powered electric generating plant, in Greensville County, VA (see 
In June, Massachusetts-based Clean Energy Future broke ground on their $800 million, 940-megawatt Utica gas-fired electric plant in Lordstown (Trumbull County), OH (see