BlackRock, JPMorgan, Citi About to Lose Kentucky as a Customer
Kentucky is joining a number of other states, including Texas, West Virginia, and Florida, in putting Big Banks (and Big Investment Firms) on notice that those companies are about to lose the business of the State of Kentucky. On Tuesday, State Treasurer Allison Ball released a list of 11 financial companies that are engaged in energy company boycotts–refusing to invest in, or loan money to, fossil energy companies. The list includes BlackRock, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase, among others.
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Here we go again. On Dec. 22, the U.S. Forest Service published a Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (DSEIS, full copy below) that allows the nearly-completed Mountain Valley Pipeline to finish up construction through 3.5 miles of Jefferson National Forest straddling West Virginia and Virginia. This is the THIRD time the Forest Service has issued this permit. Two previous attempts at the same permit were overturned by the three clown judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (i.e. 4th Circus). The public has until Feb. 6 to file official comments on this latest plan.
Hope Gas, a Local Distribution Company (LDC), otherwise known as a utility company, provides gas service to approximately 112,000 residential, industrial, and commercial customers in thirty-five West Virginia counties. Hope is about to add another 13,000 customers to that number. Yesterday, Hope announced it is buying the West Virginia division of Peoples Gas, currently owned by Essential Utilities, for an undisclosed amount.
James Daly, vice president for energy supply at New England’s largest electric utility, Eversource, recently delivered some blunt truth to regulators in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Daly told them if they want to lower the insanely high price of electricity in the region right now, in the short term, they need to import more foreign LNG, which is high-priced too. But not as high as burning oil (see 
The NYMEX Henry Hub price for natural gas is once again in freefall. Over the four previous trading sessions, the price has crashed $1.29/MMBtu (down 25%) to settle yesterday at $3.99. We haven’t seen prices this low since February 2022. Weather is the culprit. Baby, it’s warm outside! So, where is the price heading in 2023? Let’s try to answer that question.
The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) has traditionally not regulated nor overseen low-pressure natural gas gathering pipelines in the state because it’s not required to (nor allowed to) by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). That has changed. The PHMSA published new standards that bring gathering pipelines under its regulatory umbrella. The PA PUC held a public hearing in early December and subsequently published material from that hearing in the Pennsylvania Bulletin in late December–material that discusses how the change in PHMSA’s gathering pipeline regulations affects PA.
The Freeport LNG export terminal, located in Quintana Island, Texas, has been offline and not producing LNG since June 2022 due to an explosion (see 
It’s that time of year. Typically at the end of a year, or the very beginning of a new year, publications will pontificate on what they predict will happen in the coming 12 months. We’ve seen a number of such articles about the energy space, including some predictions targeted specifically for the Marcellus/Utica. We’ve selected three such articles to share with you–all of them from authors and publications we highly respect.
Last July, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, controlled by the extreme left in the Democrat Party, allowed PA House Bill (HB) 2644 to become law without his signature (see 
The Marcellus/Utica is THE number one natural gas-producing region in the country–by far. Much of the country, including the M-U, was affected by the bomb cyclone called Winter Storm Elliott over the Christmas break. The bitter cold froze off wells and caused the M-U region collectively to experience a temporary drop in production of roughly 27%. Pennsylvania’s production dropped around 20%, while Ohio’s production dropped 50%.
We came “this close” to a major electricity blackout in New England over the Christmas break, during the bomb cyclone cold snap called Winter Storm Elliott. The ONLY thing that prevented a major blackout (with people freezing to death) was…oil. Fuel oil, specifically. So-called renewable energy–solar and wind–bombed out during the bomb cyclone. Natural gas did what it could, but there wasn’t enough natgas to keep the power generators turning because people like newly-elected Gov. Maura Healey (Massachusetts wacko leftist) blocked new natgas pipelines during her tenure as the state’s Attorney General. What was left was to burn to keep the lights on and to keep people from freezing to death was fuel oil (much dirtier than natural gas). Welcome to the leftist utopia of New England. During the next bomb cyclone, New England may not be so lucky.
Last Thursday, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) published its 2021 Oil and Gas Annual Report (about five months late). This is the sixth year in a row the DEP has published the report in an interactive, electronic (i.e. online only) format. Don’t worry, we’ve turned the report into a convenient PDF for MDN readers. What does the 2021 report show? Permits issued went down, but the number of new wells drilled went up. Natural gas production has gone up (again)–to another new all-time record high.
It’s been a while since we’ve updated rig count numbers–mainly because the most reliable source we can find about basin numbers comes from S&P Global Commodity Insights (based on Enverus rig data), and S&P has not provided an update for a few months. This week they did update the number, and they are interesting. According to S&P’s analysis, based on Enverus data, the Haynesville Shale in northern Louisiana and eastern Texas (the main competitor to the Marcellus/Utica) is showing 81 active drilling rigs. That is an astonishing number, up some 37% over the same time last year. The current active rig count in the M-U, according to S&P, is 47 (with 33 rigs operating in the Marcellus and 14 in the Utica). The Haynesville is running 1.7 rigs for every 1 rig in the M-U. This is the worst imbalance we’ve seen to date.
Another twist in the effort to overturn a bill passed earlier this year by the West Virginia legislature, Senate Bill (SB) 694, which finally brings forced pooling for shale wells to the Mountain States after eight years of trying (see