Piedmont Natural Gas Building 12-Mile Pipe in Greenville County, SC
Piedmont Natural Gas, which is owned by Duke Energy, plans to build a small, 12-mile natural gas pipeline in northern Greenville County, SC. The company has about 90,000 customers in Greenville County right now and expects to add about 44,000 more over the next 20 years. Piedmont tends to run short on natural gas supplies now on the coldest days during winter. The pipeline will help meet demand now and in the future. Piedmont has just announced the route the pipeline will take, which is parallel to State Route 290, minimizing disturbance to the environment. Yet environmentalist wackos are opposed due to an irrational hatred of fossil fuels.
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We’ve seen the name a few times over the years, but Abarta Energy (aka Abarta Oil & Gas Co.) has not appeared on our radar often. The privately-owned company is based in Pittsburgh and owns (did own) assets, including wells and pipeline systems, in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky. On Sunday Abarta filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, reporting liabilities of $25.4 million and assets of $4.2 million. Abarta says it wants to liquidate/sell all of its remaining oil and gas assets.
What do you think of this one? The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) is launching a “favorites” list for Marcellus drilling and pipeline companies. You can earn yourself onto the list to get special treatment if you go to the extraordinary (and very expensive) lengths to do things the DEP wants you to do–things *not* required under current law, like “plugging abandoned oil wells, powering equipment with renewable energy, improving water quality in historically polluted streams and planting trees to offset greenhouse gas emissions.” Your reward for landing on the attaboy list? Your application for building a well pad or pipeline corridor will move to the top of the stack for review, leapfrogging those in line for a standard review. In other words, you’ll get the treatment the law guarantees (14 days for an erosion permit review) instead of the months and months of delays (in violation of the law) you get now. What a deal.
We have some exciting, and exclusive, news to share with the MDN audience. We previously told you that the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) was behaving like a child, dragging its collective heels to prevent two side-by-side injection wells in Belmont County developed by Omni Energy from beginning operation (see 
In January 2016, Invenergy announced its intention to build a natgas-powered electric plant in Elizabeth Township, in Allegheny County (see 
We were encouraged in September when the Connecticut State Supreme Court upheld the Connecticut Siting Council’s approval for NTE Energy’s proposed project to build a 650-megawatt natural gas-fired electric plant in Killingly, CT (see 
Democrats, who are truly desperate and hoping that massive theft of some people’s money to use in bribing other people to vote for them, finally passed a $1.2 trillion so-called infrastructure bill last Friday. It’s a “Hail, Mary” move aimed at trying to retain some of their power, which they will certainly lose in the 2022 election. Here’s what to know about the bill, which tries (but ultimately fails) to reduce the use of fossil fuels: Of the $1.2 trillion allocated over the next five-plus years, only $110 billion (or 9%) of it will actually be used for infrastructure–roads, bridges, etc.
Nearly two weeks ago MDN brought you the news that Southwestern Energy was in talks to buy a second (for them) Haynesville driller, GeoSouthern, for $1.7 billion (see 
In September a cabal of virulent anti-fossil fuel groups, including the Sierra Club, Clean Air Council, PennFuture, Earthworks, and Mountain Watershed Association (all of which hate oil and natural gas), launched their latest attack against the Pennsylvania oil and gas industry. The groups sent a request to the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) lobbying for a dramatic increase in the amount of money drillers must post as a bond when drilling a new well. Unfortunately, the DEP listened and is acting on that request.
What the heck is going on? First, the EPA under Biden is making a massive power grab to control oil and gas drilling (in contravention to the U.S. Constitution) by issuing methane regulations and the oil and gas industry is just laying down and taking it, after opposing the very same thing under Obama in 2016 (see 
Conservatives (including MDN) eagerly watch election results as they came in this past Tuesday night. Conservatives rightly anticipated the Virginia governor’s race would go to the Republican, Glenn Youngkin. Conservatives had hoped for a good showing in deeply blue New Jersey, with 1.1 million more registered Democrats than Republicans. We got much more than that! The odious leftist Democrat Phil Murphy ran for reelection for another four years in the Garden State. The unknown Republican running against him, Jack Ciattarelli, came within (under) 1% of the same number of votes as Murphy. Hopefully, Ciattarelli will demand a recount. The question is, did energy have anything to do with NJ’s vote, and if Ciattarelli pulls off an upset, what might that mean for pipeline projects canceled under Murphy?