Beaver County | Energy Companies | Ethane | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Processing Plants | Shell
Shell CEO Says PA Cracker Now Done, Gradually Coming Online
In June, a Shell executive told the Appalachian Energy Innovation Collaborative conference that the company’s Pennsylvania ethane cracker project was 98% done and would be fully online within “a couple of months” (see Shell Exec Says Ethane Cracker 98% Done, Online “Couple of Months”). He was right. During a recent conference call with analysts about second quarter performance, Shell CEO Ben van Beurden said, “we’re done building it” (referring to the ethane cracker), and that “we will indeed start bringing production on gradually” over the summer. Hot dang! We’re deep into summer right now.
Read More “Shell CEO Says PA Cracker Now Done, Gradually Coming Online”
Last week two Ohio state House members, Reps. Jon Cross, R-Kenton, and Jay Edwards, R-Nelsonville, introduced House Bill (HB) 685 to promote the use of the state’s natural gas energy resource. The bill would create “ENERGIZEOhio Zones” to attract new investment in areas that are disadvantaged due to lack of energy resources. The designation allows natural gas infrastructure projects (like pipelines) to receive tax abatements and speed up depreciation to lower the overall cost of development.
Earlier this week MDN told you that some Marcellus/Utica operators were singing the praises of the Manchin-Schumer Keep Inflation High bill (see 
Yesterday MDN poked fun at the gyrating up-and-down predictions from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) with respect to the spot price of natural gas at the benchmark Henry Hub (see 
Select Energy Services (SES) continues to expand with mergers and acquisitions. Earlier this year, SES bought out and merged in Nuverra Environmental Solutions (formerly Heckmann) for $45 million (see 
Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s (BHE) GT&S subsidiary announced that the Cove Point LNG export facility, which BHE GT&S operates, reached a major milestone at the end of July. Cove Point has loaded its 300th commercial LNG export cargo. All of the molecules that Cove Point liquefies come from the Marcellus Shale. MDN was there from the beginning, chronicling the journey from idea to construction to (now) loading 300 cargo ships full of Marcellus LNG. What a journey!
Once a month, the analysts (interns?) at the U.S. Energy Information Administration grab the official Henry Hub pricing dart board and play a quick game to determine what price they will predict for the average Henry Hub spot price for natural gas for the rest of this year, and then an average price for all of next year. At least, that’s what EIA’s predictions have come to feel like. How else to describe the wild gyrations both up and down in EIA’s monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook predictions? Here’s what we mean…
PublicSource, a leftist, partisan “news” organization based in Pittsburgh, has published a surprisingly helpful and informative article on Pennsylvania’s efforts to attract one of the four $2 billion hydrogen hubs provided for in Biden’s so-called infrastructure bill. The article outlines what a hydrogen hub is (and is not), and how it connects to the state’s Marcellus industry. Most of the article is free of leftist dribble (although some bias and misinformation does creep in). For the most part, this is a good primer and backgrounder on hydrogen energy.
Every single year Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf proposed a budget (all eight years of his ignominious occupation of the office), he insisted on raising taxes on the Marcellus industry by adding a high severance tax to an already-high impact tax. Every. Single. Year. In addition to an impact (i.e. severance) tax in PA, Marcellus drillers must pay an insanely high corporate net income tax (CNIT) of 9.99%. All businesses in the state are subject to the CNIT. Because of the high tax burden (the impact tax and the CNIT added together), many drillers have decided to expand elsewhere, like West Virginia, Ohio, and Louisiana. Now that he’s leaving office, Wolf has signed on to a reduction of the CNIT, claiming he never liked that nasty ole tax anyway.
One of the unforeseen “benefits” of the Manchin-Schumer “Make Inflation Higher” bill is that it will empower the jackbooted thugs who control the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by empowering them to enforce onerous regulations that require expensive technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCS) to be used by the oil and gas industry. Welcome to Amerika. The U.S. Supreme Court recently clipped EPA’s wings with respect to limiting the agency’s misinterpretation of the Clean Air Act in order to regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power plants (see 
BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest investment firm with $10 trillion in assets under management, is beginning to feel the heat of its anti-fossil fuel strategy. BlackRock is, without question, anti-fossil fuel energy. Yet the company and its representatives object when being outed as what they are, claiming they still love love love oil and gas companies. It’s not true. BlackRock pressures investors and investment funds to divest from fossil energy companies on the premise those companies are harming the planet. BlackRock itself is now being “harmed” by states like West Virginia, which has decided to end doing business with the company (see 
Two weeks ago, MDN brought you the news that a small amount of natural gas–roughly 22 MMcf/d (million cubic feet per day)–is once again flowing into the closed Freeport LNG export facility (see 
Loathsome and disgusting shale energy hater Josh Shapiro, Attorney General for Pennsylvania (running for governor), announced on Friday that he finally bullied Energy Transfer into pleading “no contest” (meaning they don’t admit to a darned thing) in a so-called criminal case against the company for a series of accidents affecting construction for both the Revolution and Mariner East pipelines. Shapiro brought the case–a case that converts accidents into crimes–in order to burnish his credibility with the wacko left in his own party. Now he has a “victory” to run on–and everyone in Pennsylvania is the poorer because of it.