Plain Dealer Alleges Political Strings at ODNR re Injection Wells
The Cleveland Plain Dealer has the long knives out for Ohio State Senator Brian Chavez (Republican) and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (also a Republican). The Plain Dealer is accusing DeWine’s Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) of corruption in not charging an injection well company owned by Chavez called DeepRock Disposal $1.3 million for cleaning up wastewater that migrated from a DeepRock injection well to a nearby conventional production well in Noble County. Instead, says the Plain Dealer, the ODNR sent the bill to the conventional well operator!
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We’re sad but not surprised. The last time we reported on Williams’ Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) Project slated for New York was last June when Williams asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for a time extension to build it (see 
Last week, the Baker Hughes U.S. rig count lost another eight rigs, down to 605, the lowest the count has been since January of 2022. Since last October, the national count had gone as low as 616 and as high as 629, and that was it. No higher and no lower. That is, until two weeks when it crashed through the floor and went lower, down to 613. And now, it has gone even lower, down to 605. The Marcellus/Utica remained even at 40 rigs after losing one rig two weeks ago. Pennsylvania operates 21 rigs; Ohio operates 11 active rigs; and West Virginia operates 8 rigs.
Antero Midstream, a separate company from Antero Resources (at least on paper, although it is managed by the same people), issued a press release yesterday to announce it had purchased a bolt-on acquisition of gathering and compression assets in the Marcellus Shale for $70 million from Summit Midstream Partners. The assets acquired include two compressor stations and 48 miles of high-pressure gas-gathering pipelines located in West Virginia.
Dominion Energy wants to build a liquified natural gas (LNG) storage facility in Person County, North Carolina, to enhance natural gas service reliability for residential and business customers in the growing region (see 
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is the sixth-largest power supplier and the largest public utility in the country. In 2021, MDN told you that TVA is spending over $1 billion to replace six coal-fired plants with natgas-fired turbines (see 
EPA Administrator Michael Regan used a considerable amount of fossil energy and emitted tons of carbon dioxide to jet over to Dubai last December to participate in the COP28 confab, where he released a final rule that was “two years in the making” to force the U.S. oil and gas industry to cut methane emissions by using budget-busting new technologies and onerous (frequent) inspections (see 
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The great state of Pennsylvania has an Independent Fiscal Office (IFO), created by Act 120 of 2010 and Act 100 of 2016. The IFO analyzes fiscal proposals made by state agencies and is nonpartisan in its analyses. PA State Senator Gene Yaw, from Lycoming County (and Chairman of the Senate Environmental Resources & Energy Committee), introduced a bill last June to create an Independent Energy Office (IEO) modeled along the same lines as the IFO (see 
UGI, a diversified energy company with midstream (pipeline) operations in the Marcellus and one of PA’s largest utility companies, hinted last summer that it was looking to sell or spin off its propane subsidiary into a new company (see 
Equitrans Midstream, builder of the mighty Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), issued its first quarter 2024 update yesterday. The update came without the typical conference call for analysts, given the impending merger with (takeover by) EQT Corporation. Picking through the prepared updates and filings with the SEC, we discovered some useful bits of news. First and foremost, Equitrans expects to begin operations on MVP on May 31st, provided all necessary directives are issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). MVP’s cost went up yet again, from $7.6 billion, estimated earlier this year, to now approximately $7.85 billion. However, MVP wasn’t the only big news coming from the update.
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