‘First of Its Kind’ Methane/Ethane PA Power Plant Now Online
Competitive Power Ventures’ (CPV) Fairview Energy Center, a 1,050-megawatt natural gas AND ethane-fueled combined-cycle electric generating plant in Cambria County, PA, went online ahead of schedule back in December (see CPV Marcellus-Fired Electric Plant in Cambria Goes Online Early). The plant went online using Marcellus gas (methane). However, the plant is designed to mix ethane in with methane and burn the mix. CPV announced yesterday tests for blending in ethane are now complete and the plant is operating at a 75/25 ratio of methane to ethane. According to CPV, Fairview Energy Center is “the first and only facility of its scale in the world to possess high content ethane blending with natural gas capabilities.”
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Advanced Power Services is building a 1,100-megawatt natural gas-fired electric generation facility in Wellsville, Columbiana County. Dominion Energy is building 5 miles of new pipeline, called the West Loop Project, from western PA into Ohio to feed the Wellsville plant (see 
Electric power generator FirstEnergy (now called Energy Harbor Corp.) pulled off what we consider the biggest case of deception in the history of Ohio by pressuring Ohio legislators and a RINO governor to sign into law a bill to force Ohio residents to pay the company $1 billion so it can keep open two uneconomic/failing nuclear power plants (see 
One of our favorite Energy in Depth writers, Nicole Jacobs, has just published a great post that outlines the huge impact new natural gas-fired (mostly Utica Shale gas) power plants have had and will have in Ohio. She includes a list of 10 projects either already built and running, under construction, or on the books to get built. When you add up the total capacity for all 10 plants, they will generate an amazing 9,215 megawatts of electricity, enough to power upward of 9 million homes! The companies building those 10 plants are investing $15.9 billion. This is huge for Ohio’s economy.
We’ll be right upfront and say this article is a hard one for us to wrap our brains around. In order to explain something in simple terms, you must first understand it. We don’t fully understand the concepts discussed below, but feel it’s important to pass along anyway. In September 2018 MDN brought you an article about a concept called blockchain, and to some degree, bitcoin (see 
NETL (National Energy Technology Laboratory), one of our country’s treasured national lab facilities, recently released a report and case study that shows if we as a country want reliability in our electric grid (no blackouts), we need to build more natural gas pipelines to feed natgas-fired power plants. “As the electric power system relies more heavily on natural gas power generation, the reliability and resiliency of the Nation’s electrical system will become increasingly linked to the performance and capabilities of the natural gas delivery system.” How much more in the way of new pipelines are needed? “Conservatively, an investment of $470 million to $1.1 billion over that already entrained in the long-haul natural gas transmission system is identified to avoid even worse outcomes.” Start the backhoes!
Big time opposition continues to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s plan to force the state to participate in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a tax on carbon aimed at coal and natural gas-fired electric power plants, with an eye to driving them out of business. We’ve written plenty about Wolf’s naked power grab, to force the state into RGGI without the legislature’s consent (
Yesterday the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) released a draft of its proposed rules for PA’s participation in what is called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). It’s a tax on carbon aimed at coal and natural gas-fired electric power plants, with an eye to driving them out of business. PA Gov. Tom Wolf is attempting to force PA to participate in RGGI, a collection of blue northeastern states (New England, NY and NJ) in an attempt to bolster his credibility with environmentalist wackos–to ingratiate himself with the wackos so he is more appealing as a Vice Presidential candidate.
While we’re sure he means well, Congressman David McKinley, a professional engineer (P.E.) from West Virginia (Republican) has thrown his support behind a “bipartisan” effort to create a new federal bureaucracy to oversee the decarbonization of the power generation sector. In other words, an effort that will end the use of natural gas to generate electricity–by 2050. We just can’t support something like that. It’s short-sighted, heavy-handed, and creating a new federal bureaucracy simply goes in the wrong direction. Period.
Pennsylvania State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, Majority Chair of the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, doesn’t put up with the juvenile antics from the Democrats on his committee–like Danielle Friel Otten and Greg Vitali–from those who violate decorum by pretending they want to ask a question when in fact they want to pontificate like the gasbags they are. Wednesday at a hearing on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), Metcalfe shut down Otten and Vitali when they attempted to violate rules and bloviate instead of asking relevant questions.
If there’s any silver lining to the ongoing low price for natural gas (NYMEX price closed at $1.86 yesterday), it is that gas-fired power generation kicks in with more demand, which will ultimately cause the price to rise–or at least not fall any further. Electric generation is a critically important market for natural gas. We spotted a couple of interesting articles. The first, from Platts, outlines the relationship of low gas prices to more switching from coal to gas. Platts says if gas stays under $2/Mcf, “power burn could see significant upside risk.” The other article, from Rigzone, says natgas will generate nearly 40% of all electricity in 2020–double what it generated just 10 years ago.
The Ohio Supreme Court, on Christmas Eve, threw a lifeline to an effort to overturn an Ohio law that provides corporate welfare in the form of $1 billion of ratepayer (taxpayer) money to FirstEnergy, which recently changed its name to Energy Harbor (see 