Freeport LNG Changes Restart Date from Mid- to End-December
Three weeks ago, Freeport LNG, which has been out of commission since early June, changed the target date it would restart from November to mid-December (see Freeport LNG Announces Fix-it Work 90% Done, Restart in Mid-Dec). That wasn’t the first time the company moved the restart date, and (it seems), not the last. On Friday, Freeport announced another delay. The company now says feed gas will not flow to the facility until the end of December.
Read More “Freeport LNG Changes Restart Date from Mid- to End-December”
Just last week, we told you that a West Virginia Circuit Court judge who allegedly waved and pointed a gun at an attorney for EQT Corporation during a hearing about a case brought against EQT by landowners for improper deductions of post-production expenses from their royalty payments had resigned (see 
This one came right out of left field, and we didn’t see it coming. Totally unexpected. Yesterday, outgoing U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, from Pennsylvania, introduced a bill to reform pipeline permitting. The bill specifically approves and would push through final construction for Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a pipeline that doesn’t even touch PA (it starts in Wetzel County, WV, and ends in Pittsylvania County, VA). The bill was concurrently introduced in the House by Congressman Mike Kelly, also from PA. Weird. Does this bill stand even a remote chance of passing before Congress adjourns and the next Congress takes over in early January?
A group of 40 so-called environmental groups (all of them leftist radicals) is doing its best to defeat the 94% completed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) project. The groups sent a letter yesterday to officials at the U.S. Dept. of Interior, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), asking those agencies to stretch out the process of granting new permits (for the THIRD time) to complete MVP by as long as possible. The radicals want a 30-day public scoping period, for starters, so they can repeat their lies once again. They’ve already had their say multiple times for many months–they don’t need another 30-day slot now.
This is getting serious–for woke investment firm BlackRock, a company that demands companies avoid using fossil energy in order to combat global warming. BIG states controlled by Republicans have had enough of BlackRock’s anti-fossil energy activism and are fighting back. In August, Texas, the second largest state (by population) in the country, announced the state’s public pension funds and government agencies are divesting from BlackRock and nine other companies (see 
Updates for Pennsylvania’s conventional oil and gas drillers, both environmental protection standards and waste handling standards (two different updates), will now fall to the incoming Josh Shapiro administration. So says the Acting Secretary of the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), Kurt Klapkowski. In other words, Klapkowski and his boss, Gov. Tom Wolf, are punting these important updates to the anti-drilling Shapiro. Washing their hands of it.
Three weeks ago, one of the ten natural gas storage wells at the Equitrans Rager Mountain Gas Storage Area in Jackson Township, Cambria County (in Pennsylvania) began to leak and ended up leaking roughly 100 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of gas into the atmosphere (see 
In early 2015, MDN told you the then-Obama administration’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) did a disservice to not only the drilling industry, but the wind industry, farmers, and the construction industry, when it listed the northern long-eared bat as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act (see 
Yesterday the Pennsylvania Environmental Quality Board (EQB), a part of the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection, voted to adopt a last-minute, rushed-through-in-a-hurry regulation to control volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions (and by extension, methane emissions) from conventional oil and gas operations in the state. The DEP and EQB had more than five years to work on these regulations and chose to fritter away the time. Faced with losing federal highway budget money without a new regulation in place, they rushed it–and botched it. Now the mom-and-pop oil and gas companies across the state will pay the price (and some will go out of business).
In February, MDN brought you news about a “last mile” pipeline from Dominion Energy (see 
Yet another area heavily infested with far-left Democrats has voted to abolish the freedom of residents to choose their own energy source. The Montgomery County (Maryland) County Council voted 9-0 (all nine are Dems) to ban new natural gas hookups beginning in 2026. Montgomery County is a suburb of the D.C. swamp (lots of swamp dwellers in Montgomery). The County Executive, also a Dem, said he supports the ban and will sign it into law. This is what happens under one-party rule when that party doesn’t give a damn about the poor people and people of color who will end up being most affected by such a ban.
The partisan bully Josh Shapiro, far-left Attorney General in Pennsylvania (who is becoming Governor on Jan. 1, to PA’s shame), has claimed victory in converting what was at best an accident into a crime against Coterra Energy (née Cabot Oil & Gas). Yesterday in a courtroom in Susquehanna County, PA, Coterra plead “no contest” to a single misdemeanor charge Shapiro ginned up against the company over stray methane in a few water wells in Dimock, PA going back 14 years. It is a horrible miscarriage of justice. We wouldn’t blame Coterra if they NEVER drill another well in the state.
The Plastics Industry Association (PLASTICS) has just published its “2022 Size and Impact Report” (Executive Summary below). In general, the report shows how the U.S. plastics industry, which is critical and necessary for modern existence, is growing. Manufacturing plants that use plastics once moved overseas and are now returning the U.S. Why? To take advantage of cheap plastics being produced here as a result of shale energy. Here’s something that surprised us about the report: Ohio is the #1 state in the entire country for the number of jobs in the plastics industry. Ohio beat out both California and Texas (the two most populous states in the country) in plastics employment. Wow!