Hooray! WV Fights Back, State Drops Investments with BlackRock Fund
Three cheers for West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore! Yesterday Moore announced the WV Board of Treasury Investments, which manages the state’s roughly $8 billion operating funds, will no longer use BlackRock Inc. investment funds as part of its banking transactions. WV is divesting from the divestors. BlackRock is part of a leftist (very political) group aggressively trying to defund all oil and gas companies (see Investors Representing Half the World’s Wealth Go Mad re Net-Zero). Now it’s time to choose sides and to defund the defunders–to divest the divestors. Moore just fired the first shot. It’s already causing headaches for BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
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EQT Corporation, the largest natural gas producer in the United States, announced last Friday that all of its natural gas produced in Washington and Greene counties in Pennsylvania (the majority of its production, some 4 Bcf/d) is now officially certified as “responsibly produced” gas by two different certification organizations: Equitable Origin and MiQ. That 4 Bcf/d of certified gas represents 4.5% of all natural gas produced in the U.S.
S&P Global Platts Analytics is reporting natural gas production in the Marcellus/Utica (which they call Appalachia) has “tumbled.” After reaching a record-high 34.8 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) in late December, Appalachia gas production fell to an estimated 33.3 Bcf/d on Jan. 14 (down 4%). The drop in production has caused the price of gas at regional trading hubs like Eastern Gas South (formerly Dominion South) to jump. Eastern Gas South is up 34 cents from the beginning of January.
Two days ago New England generated 24% (a quarter) of the electricity it needs by burning…fuel oil. Why? Low supplies of natural gas. How much electricity was generated by so-called renewables on the same day? According to ISO New England, only 8% of electricity on Jan. 16 was generated by renewables. However, if you take out burning garbage, burning wood, and burning natural gas from landfills (all included in the “renewables” number), just 2.5% of New England’s electricity came from solar and wind, what most people think of as renewable energy. Do you see the folly of dumping fossil energy anytime in the next 50-100 years?
As Yogi Berra once quipped, this feels like déjà vu all over again. In 2019 New York City and Long Island experienced an epic showdown with National Grid, which supplies natural gas to all of Long Island including Brooklyn and Queens. National Grid slapped a moratorium on new gas hookups due to short supplies and then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s blocking of a pipeline to bring more supplies to the region. After extreme blowback from customers, Cuomo threatened to rip National Grid’s franchise away and give it to someone else unless they paid $30 million in bribes and started hooking up new customers again. National Grid caved and the bad guy, Cuomo, won (see 
In early November MDN told you about a massive new power grab being attempted by the Biden Dept. of Transportation’s PHMSA, implementing new regulations to take control of local gathering pipelines, in contravention to the U.S. Constitution (see 
Back in December, MDN editor Jim Willis had the delight and pleasure of attending an open house at the new location of the 
Just coming to light for us now is an application to build a “data center” in Morgantown, WV. The application was filed last August, but the WV Dept. of Environmental Protection’s Division of Air Quality held a hearing yesterday to accept public input on the facility. Marion Energy Partners wants to build the facility, yet its purpose is shrouded in mystery. The best guess is that this is another new cryptocurrency (bitcoin) mining operation. Our interest is that it will use four natural gas-fired turbines to generate the huge amounts of electricity needed to operate it–natural gas that will come from the Marcellus/Utica.
A Shell spokesman last week said that the mighty ethane cracker plant the company is building in Monaca (Beaver County), PA is now 80% complete and projected to be operational “sometime this year,” although a more specific date can’t be nailed down. Currently, there are some 8,000 workers who report to the construction site each day. Simply astounding! When the plant is done and operational, it will employ about 600 permanent on-site workers. Shell is now in recruiting mode to find those 600 permanent workers.
Earlier this week MDN told you that Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf swiftly vetoed a Senate resolution sent to him that would block PA from joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), nothing more than a carbon tax that won’t actually reduce carbon emissions (see 
Did you catch the huge spike in the NYMEX Henry Hub futures price yesterday? Day over day, the February NYMEX contract price increased by $0.61 to close at $4.86/MMBtu–up 12.52% in a single day. Similarly, the March NYMEX futures contract jumped by $0.36 cents to close at $4.33. Why the big gains? In a single word: weather.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), natural gas spot prices at Henry Hub averaged $3.91/MMBtu for 2021. Each month the EIA issues a Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO). In the latest STEO update for January, EIA predicts that the annual average HH price will average $3.79/MMBtu in 2022, down $0.12 from 2021. EIA further predicts the HH price in 2023 will go down yet more, to an average of $3.63.
Rystad Energy, based in Norway, is an independent energy research and business intelligence company providing data, analytics, and consultancy services to clients exposed to the energy industry across the globe. Rystad is pretty tuned-in when it comes to what’s happening in the oil and gas industry. Earlier this week the company released an analysis that shows global oil and gas investments will expand by $26 billion this year as the industry continues its recovery from the worst of the pandemic. Rystad Energy projects overall oil and gas investments will rise 4% to $628 billion this year from $602 billion in 2021. The main factor behind the increase is a 14% increase in upstream gas (gas drilling) and LNG investments. That’s good news for the M-U.
Yesterday the American Petroleum Institute (API) issued its annual “State of American Energy” report (full copy below). We will say right up front we’ve had our differences of opinion with the API and its direction, particularly over the past year, but there is no disputing the API remains the premier organization representing the oil and gas industry in the U.S. (and beyond). The API is at the top of the O&G food chain. So it’s a big deal that during the annual virtual event to unveil the latest API report the organization featured a young completions engineer who works for Coterra Energy (formerly Cabot Oil & Gas) in Susquehanna County, PA.