3 FERC Nominees on the Hot Seat at Senate Hearing, No Fireworks
Earlier this month, MDN told you that President Joementia Biden has nominated three new candidates to become Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) commissioners (see Biden Announces 3 New FERC Commissioner Nominees, Finally). The three, two Democrats and one Republican, faced questions from the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee in a hearing held yesterday. While all three got a good grilling (and had to endure pontificating by Senators), there really was little to no fireworks at the hearing.
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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 
Honestly, we can’t heap enough praise on the excellent work done by Pennsylvania shale drillers. It is unreasonable to expect there will be absolutely zero problems when engaging in something as complex as drilling a mile straight down and then one to four miles horizontally underground. Nothing in life is error-free. NOTHING. There’s always a problem. There’s always a slight error somewhere. Yet in PA drilling, only 54 shale wells out of 14,412 drilled since 2004 have resulted in the shale well “communicating with” (interfering with or leaking methane to) nearby water wells, conventional wells, abandoned wells, or other shale wells. That’s 0.0037 of the time, or 3.7 wells for every 1,000 drilled. Converting that number to a percentage, it’s 0.37% (about one-third of a single percentage point). Rounding further, it’s 0% of the time.
Where do business dreams go to die? New York State, of course. Yesterday, the New York State Senate passed a bill to ban the use of carbon dioxide (CO2) in any process to extract natural gas or oil in the so-called Empire State. The NY Assembly (our state’s lower chamber) voted to approve the same bill a week ago (see 
Water use restrictions have finally been lifted at the Beaver Run Reservoir in Westmoreland County, PA (near Pittsburgh). The Municipal Authority of Westmoreland County (MAWC), which manages Beaver Run Reservoir, has issued a contract to CNX Resources allowing the company to buy up to 51 million gallons of water to use in fracking at nearby gas wells. CNX will pay $12,855 for every 1.5 million gallons of water it buys. If the company ends up buying the full 51 million gallons, it will pay the MAWC $437,000.
Here’s a strange one we don’t quite understand. Yet. Two weeks ago we brought you the news that a jury in a federal court had decided a group of Utica shale drillers, including Rice Drilling (now EQT), Ascent Resources, XTO, and Gulfport Energy, were not guilty of “unjust enrichment” by drilling into the Point Pleasant shale layer that sits immediately below the Utica (see 
Plugging old abandoned (which means no longer producing) and orphaned (meaning the owner is not known) wells is not a simple thing to do. It’s estimated that Pennsylvania has perhaps 350,000 old abandoned and orphaned wells, many of them leftover from the early days of conventional oil drilling. The problem is finding them. Many are in out-of-the-way places. Plugging them cheaply is no simple matter. PA, OH, and WV have received millions from the federal government to help with their well plugging programs in an effort to control so-called fugitive methane. Over the past year, PA has plugged over 200 old wells (see 
In January 2023, three Marcellus/Utica companies — Chesapeake Energy, EQT, and Equitrans Midstream — launched the Appalachian Methane Initiative (AMI), a coalition committed to further enhancing methane monitoring throughout the Appalachia Basin and reducing methane emissions throughout the region (see 
The State of Texas just dropped a major bombshell on investment manager BlackRock and the entire so-called ESG (environment, social, governance) space. The Texas Permanent School Fund (PSF), created in the 19th century to support the state’s public schools, has pulled $8.5 billion of its investments away from BlackRock over the state’s determination that BlackRock is engaged in a boycott of energy companies by pressuring companies to avoid the fossil fuel sector. The Texas PSF has $53 billion in invested assets. Investing $8.5 billion of it with BlackRock represents 16% of the entire fund.
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?
MiQ is one of two major gas certification authorities and is used by nearly every Marcellus/Utica driller. Last October, MDN brought you information about the two major gas certification authorities, MiQ and Project Canary, and the effort by drillers to get their gas officially certified as responsibly sourced (see 
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.
The latest monthly U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) Drilling Productivity Report (DPR) for March, issued yesterday (below), shows EIA believes shale gas production across the seven major plays tracked in the monthly DPR for April will decrease production from the prior month of March. This is the ninth month in a row that EIA has predicted shale gas production will decrease for the combined seven plays. However, it won’t decrease everywhere. Gas-focused plays like the Marcellus/Utica and the Haynesville will see the biggest drop in production. In contrast, the oily Permian play will boost the production of “associated” natural gas — the gas that comes out of the ground along with oil. The Permian is also boosting oil production in April.
For years, we have watched natural gas production in oil-focused plays like the Permian (in Texas and New Mexico) steadily rise. It was an annoyance, a curiosity, mostly an afterthought because production in the Marcellus/Utica, where we concentrate our attention, was also rising and quite dominant. But the M-U hit a plateau in December 2019 and in January 2020 began a long-term trend of staying about even (see