Dems Intro Bill to Create PA-Only Marcellus-Killing Carbon Tax
It’s full speed ahead for the radical anti-Marcellus Democrats in the Pennsylvania State Legislature. Last week, PA Gov. Josh Shapiro traveled to Scranton, PA, to do a dog-and-pony show announcing his personalized version of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) carbon tax that would apply only to PA (see PA Gov. Shapiro Proposes Own Version of Marcellus-Killing Carbon Tax). Shapiro calls it PACER, the Pennsylvania Climate Emissions Reduction Act. PACER would do what RGGI does — slap a huge tax on gas-fired power plants because they burn methane that gets converted into carbon dioxide. His far-left allies in the legislature — Sen. Carolyn Comitta (D-Chester), Sen. Steve Santarsiero (D-Bucks), Rep. Danielle Friel Otten (D-Chester), and Rep. Aerion Abney (D-Allegheny) — are about to introduce a bill in both chambers to make PACER a reality. Good luck with that in the GOP-controlled Senate!
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The annual CERAWeek by S&P Global conference is happening now in Houston. Everybody who’s anybody is there. (Yes, we’re nobodies; we’re not there!) Oil and gas CEOs, politicians, regulatory agencies — they all convene in Houston to talk about energy at what is billed as “the world’s premier energy conference.” Toby Rice, CEO of EQT Corporation (the largest natural gas producer in the U.S.), was there yesterday. He had some VERY interesting things to say during a panel discussion and on the sidelines. Rice touted the need for more pipeline infrastructure, predicting wild swings in the price of natural gas absent new pipelines. He also said there’s an even bigger market than LNG for U.S. natural gas. What could it be?
Last week, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro traveled to Scranton, PA, to do a dog-and-pony show announcing his personalized version of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) carbon tax that would apply only to PA (see 
Thanks to abundant, clean Marcellus shale gas, Pennsylvania remained the country’s top electricity exporter in 2023 while simultaneously reaching a new low for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from electricity generation, according to the Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office’s (IFO) latest analysis. Yes, you read that right. PA is producing more electricity than ever, yet CO2 emissions from electric generation are lower than ever. How can that be?
The Independent System Operator-New England (ISO-NE) is warning “blue states” in the northeast (states controlled by Democrats with an iron fist) that their strategy of pushing 100% renewables and eliminating fossil fuel energy has a fatal flaw. At the federal and state levels, elected Democrats are pushing hard to phase out fossil fuel-fired power infrastructure and replace it with sources of so-called “green” energy like wind and solar. Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont — the states that are served by ISO-NE — all have green energy mandates. And they are all in imminent danger of blackouts.
In an embarrassing act of ignorance, seven Virginia state delegates and two state senators (all of them Democrats) who represent the greater Richmond, VA area signed a statement last Wednesday opposing Dominion Energy’s plan to build four small “peaker” electric generating plants in Chesterfield County, VA, a Richmond suburb (see 
The Bidenistas at the EPA announced last night the agency will delay, until AFTER the November election, implementing harsh new regulations aimed at closing down gas-fired power plants across the country. The unstated purpose is to remove this highly unpopular edict as a campaign issue so the bag of bones known as Joementia can try to get himself reelected. We suppose this is good news, as it means these regs will likely never get implemented for existing power plants — they will certainly be dropped in a DJT administration. Still, the threat looms over the industry, and nobody will build a new plant under these harsh regulations, which WILL apply to any new gas-fired power plant project effective immediately. So all work on new plants will stop forthwith. That’s the downside to the announcement.
On Feb. 15, members of the South Carolina Public Service Commission approved a proposed project to build a 1,020-megawatt (MV) gas-fired power plant in the state’s Lowcountry, in Colleton County. The project is a 50/50 partnership between Dominion Energy (formerly South Carolina Electric & Gas) and Santee Cooper (South Carolina’s state-owned electric and water utility). In a typical knee-jerk reaction, several Big Green groups are opposing the plan, in particular because of a pipeline that will need to be built to deliver Marcellus/Utica gas to the plant.
In June 2016, Massachusetts-based Clean Energy Future broke ground on an $800 million, 940-megawatt Utica gas-fired electric plant in Lordstown (Trumbull County), OH (see 
The number crunchers at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) published a post yesterday highlighting that in 2024, some 5.2 gigawatts (GW) of U.S. electric generating capacity will be retired. It is the least amount of capacity being retired since 2008, in the past 25 years. The graphic the crunchers used is somewhat stark and misleading. It shows the number one category of retirements is natural gas power plants, retiring 2.4 GW (46% of all retirements). What you don’t discover until deep into the post is that a single gas-fired plant, Boston’s Mystic Generating Station, which has been online since the 1940s (!), represents 1,413-MW (60%) of the gas plants retiring.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally-owned electric utility corporation in the U.S. TVA’s service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. TVA is the sixth-largest power supplier and the largest public utility in the country. Last May, TVA announced that it would convert the Kingston Fossil Plant (coal-fired plant) in East Tennessee to a natural gas-fired plant capable of generating 1,500 megawatts of electricity (see 
Once a month, the analysts at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) issue the agency’s Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), their best guess about where energy prices and production will go in the next 12 months or so. We sometimes poke good-natured fun at the EIA because their predictions go up in one month, and in the next month, they go down, etc. What about the latest STEO dart board, published yesterday? It won’t surprise you to read that due to warmer weather, the EIA prognosticators believe the average Henry Hub natural gas spot prices will remain “subdued” around $2.40/MMBtu in February and March. What about for the entire year?
Duke Energy is a Fortune 150 company headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., and is one of America’s largest energy holding companies. Last summer, Duke announced plans to build a new gas-fired power plant in Person County, NC. The company recently announced it wants to double it — build a second big gas-fired plant at the same location (see