NatGas is Greener than Wind & Solar When Counting CO2 Footprint
Every now and again, we come across someone who is willing to risk their career by openly admitting the truth. This time that brave soul is Russell Johns, the George E. Trimble Chair in Energy and Mineral Sciences at the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State University. In a letter to the editor published in the student-run Penn State Daily Collegian, Johns points out that when considering the intense mining operations needed to harvest materials used in solar and wind technology, and the shipping associated with those materials, etc., solar and wind actually have a *bigger* carbon dioxide footprint than does using natural gas. In other words, natural gas is greener than wind and solar!
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While this is technically not a Marcellus/Utica story, it does affect our region (as well as all regions) due to the enormity of how it impacts the overall natural gas market. Russia, using the flimsy excuse that they found some trouble with a turbine during maintenance, has decided to keep the Nord Stream 1 pipeline closed down indefinitely after what was supposed to be a three-day outage to do routine maintenance. The outage denies Europe natural gas a critical time during which they are attempting to fill up storage ahead of the winter months. This is a transparent play by Vladimir Putin, who pulls all the strings in Russia, to squeeze Europe and get it to cave to his will and accept his invasion of Ukraine (i.e. remove all sanctions).
In a small but important victory against Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s effort to force the state to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) carbon tax scheme, the PA Supreme Court on Wednesday opted not to overturn a Commonwealth Court decision that blocks the state from participating in RGGI until several lawsuits play out. The state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), under Wolf’s thumb, argued the state should be allowed to enforce the new tax in advance of a resolution to the lawsuits. Nope. Not gonna happen. It now appears it will be early next year before RGGI can go into effect–if ever.
The mighty Shell ethane cracker complex in Monaca (Beaver County), PA, is due to come online any day now. In fact, with such a large and complex facility, it is already “coming online” gradually and has been since August (see 
It does our heart good to see people pushing back against the woke leftism that is called ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing. We always feel a bit conflicted when discussing ESG. We are NOT talking about companies, many of them in the Marcellus/Utica, that have programs and efforts underway to become ever better corporate citizens. What we are talking about is leftists forcing investors to abandon investments in fossil energy companies by using arbitrary ESG standards (that they make up and enforce). Companies that force ESG investing include the largest investment firm on the planet–BlackRock. We spotted an excellent story in the Wall Street Journal that says it’s time to bust up big woke ESG companies like BlackRock by using existing anti-trust laws. Amen to that!
In a new report published this week by the Manhattan Institute, “The “Energy Transition” Delusion: A Reality Reset” (full copy below), Mark Mills takes on the dangerous delusion of a global energy transition that eliminates the use of fossil fuels. Looking at energy markets and public policy around the world, Mills asks readers of the report to “consider that years of hypertrophied rhetoric and trillions of dollars of spending and subsidies on a transition have not significantly changed the energy landscape.” Here are the facts: The world still depends on hydrocarbons (fossil fuels) for 84% of all energy, just two percentage points lower than 20 years ago. Solar and wind technologies today supply barely 5% of global energy. Indeed it is a dangerous self-delusion to say we can dump fossil energy anytime soon–within the next 50-100 years. At least, not without a mass extinction (execution) of the human race.
For more than four years, we have been calling attention to the fact that the Boston/New England area imports FOREIGN LNG each year, even though abundant DOMESTIC supplies sit a few hundred miles away in the Pennsylvania Marcellus (see 
In September 2021, the Weirton (WV) Zoning Board of Appeals rejected a request by Southwestern Energy to build a well pad inside city limits (see 
A futures contract is a legal agreement to buy or sell a particular commodity asset (like natural gas) at a predetermined price at a specified time in the future. The Henry Hub Natural Gas futures contract (NG) on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) is widely used as the national benchmark price for natural gas. The Henry Hub (HH) is located in southern Louisiana where 16 interstate natural gas pipeline systems converge. But just about any trading hub along natgas pipelines can have a futures contract associated with it. For example, the Eastern Gas South hub in southwestern Pennsylvania (which used to be called Dominion South) has monthly futures contracts extending out for years. Eastern Gas South and other M-U hubs are seeing the price for futures contracts drop like a rock compared to HH. Why? Lack of takeaway pipeline capacity.
In June, seemingly out of nowhere, a plan to build an LNG export facility on the banks of the Delaware River south of Philadelphia made big headlines in Philly. Penn LNG, headed by Franc James, a native of Philadelphia, has “quietly lined up support to build a $6.4 billion liquefied natural gas export terminal near Philly.” While acknowledging such a project will face stiff opposition, James is planning to pre-file with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) by the end of this year, and reach a final investment decision (FID) by 2024. Full speed ahead!
We experienced déjà vu as we read about a hearing held Tuesday evening in Plum Boro (Allegheny County, PA) about a proposed shale wastewater injection well. Some 20 people made their way to the microphones to voice their objections to plans by Penneco Environmental Solutions to site a second injection well in the boro–right next to an existing injection well. We’ve heard it all before, almost four years ago, when some of the same people objected to Penneco’s plans to install the first injection well (see 
Get a Democrat nurse to repeat the talking points from two far-left, lying Democrat groups (the Conservation Voters of PA and the NRDC) bashing the Republican candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, in a TV commercial, and it’s just another regurgitate-the-lies story from lamestream media. This time the lies are that Doug Mastriano loves to pollute–because he stands up for the Marcellus shale industry in the state. We hope PA residents (and U.S. residents across the country) are beginning to see through the lies spread by the Democrat left. The left can’t argue and debate the facts, so they resort to name-calling and lies. The good news is that the left is spending money on this kind of thing, meaning they don’t believe that hardened anti-driller Josh Shapiro (Democrat, currently Attorney General) has the race for governor locked up–as all the “polls” quoted by lamestream media indicate.
In May 2021, the radicals from PennFuture, the Philadelphia-based Clean Air Council, and the so-called Center for Biological Diversity (better named the Center for Leftwing Conformity) challenged an air permit issued by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) for the Renovo Energy Center, a Marcellus-fired power plant in Clinton County (northcentral), PA (see 
Cheniere Energy operates the largest LNG export facility in the U.S.–the Sabine Pass LNG facility in the Lake Charles, LA area. Sabine Pass liquefies and exports 30 mtpa (million tonnes per year) of LNG. If new plans unveiled by Cheniere play out, the company’s second LNG export facility in Corpus Christi, TX, will come close to the output at Sabine Pass–around 28 mtpa. Both facilities have the capability of exporting Marcellus/Utica molecules.