Troubling: PennEast Pipeline Withdraws NJ Eminent Domain Lawsuits
Some deeply disturbing news out of New Jersey. You may recall that PennEast Pipeline, a 120-mile, primarily 36-inch pipeline that will cost $1 billion to build and run from Dallas, Luzerne County, in northeastern Pennsylvania, and terminate at Transco’s pipeline interconnection near Pennington, Mercer County, New Jersey, won a huge and important victory at the U.S. Supreme Court in June (see PennEast Pipeline Squeaks Out 5-4 Supreme Court Victory Over NJ). The victory allows PennEast to use eminent domain to run the pipeline across property owned or controlled by the State of New Jersey. Yet PennEast notified federal court this week it is withdrawing its eminent domain case against NJ for 42 properties the state either controls or owns. What the heck is going on?
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Lest you think we’ve been overstating the case that Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf wants to end the use of natural gas-fired electric power plants as evidenced by his actions in forcing the state to join the draconian Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) carbon tax scheme, Wolf’s latest so-called climate plan will remove all doubt for you. Yesterday Wolf and his obsequious Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary Pat McDonnell released a 278-page “climate” plan that, among other things, essentially bans natural gas-fired power plants.
The weather turning a bit cooler along with a three-week planned maintenance outage at the Cove Point LNG plant in Maryland is causing the spot price for natural gas in the Marcellus and Utica to fall precipitously. Of course the price recently, over the past few weeks, rose precipitously–so a sudden fall is not all that unusual. How much has the price fallen and how far will it go down?
While natural gas prices have always floated up and down, lately we’ve seen a rapid run-up in the NYMEX futures price that hit a seven-year high last week (see 
Five Big Green groups (some of them funded by foreign governments) led by one of the worst–the Sierra Club–are lobbying the Pennsylvania Environmental Quality Board (EQB) to force PA’s oil and gas drillers to prepay the full amount to decommission wells they drill today and likely won’t be played out for at least 30, maybe as much as 50 years from now. It’s yet another attempt to make drilling for natural gas and oil in the Keystone State so onerous, so expensive, drillers will give up.
Although the price of natural gas has rocketed this year and cash flows for Marcellus/Utica drillers have ballooned, showering drillers with plenty of free cash flow, M-U drillers are spending less (19% less) on capital expenditures than they did in 2020. Production in the M-U is up slightly by 4% so far in 2021 vs. 2020. The experts at RBN Energy have dived into this latest twist in the shale story to help explain what’s going on and why.
If this doesn’t prove that the environmental left isn’t really interested in the environment, but instead only in their leftist (Communistic) policies, nothing will prove it to you. A radical faction of Physicians for Social Responsibility calling itself “Concerned Health Professionals of Pennsylvania” (a false statement if ever there was one) is actively, aggressively trying to end the ability of Pennsylvania’s fracking companies to recycle wastewater (brine) that comes from naturally-occurring water deep in the ground. They figure if they can stop fracking’s green recycling program, maybe they can shut down fracking period. Sick.
Not only is gas so-called “responsible gas” if it’s extracted from the ground in a certain way, it’s even more “responsible” if it flows through a pipeline a certain way. That’s the theory anyway. In June of this year, Southwestern Energy announced it was working with Project Canary to certify all of its Marcellus/Utica gas production as responsible (see 
The leftist Democrats in Congress (and The White House) are not content to use a single barrel shotgun in its attempt to murder natural gas use in the U.S. They’ve brought out the double barrel shotgun. The federal government is proposing, under the Biden EPA, sweeping new methane emission regulations. The regulations are far worse than anything even in the Obamadroid era. That’s barrel number one. At the same time, the Dems intend to slap an insanely high new tax on methane in their so-called budget reconciliation bill. That’s the second barrel.
For years landowners who have been organized and hoodwinked by Big Green groups have attacked the 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) project on its legally and federally delegated right to use eminent domain to condemn property for landowners who have refused to negotiate in good faith. One such case remains, holding on…just barely.
American Energy Partners, Inc. (AEPT), based in Allentown, PA, is a small but diversified company. They have their fingers in a number of different oil and gas pies, including subsidiaries in drilling, remediation, water, valuation services, and education. Last Friday the company announced yet another acquisition as it continues to grow. AEPT is buying a second “privately held energy services company” (unnamed) that operates in the Marcellus/Utica region. The unnamed company focuses on providing facility maintenance, transportation, logistics, and environmental services to the energy and industrial sectors.
Sometimes it seems like a full-time job running around and setting the record straight, correcting the outright lies and half-truths spun by the wacko environmental left. For example, shoveling up the messes made by the Ohio River Valley Institute (ORVI), a far-left, hyper-partisan, nonprofit organization. Last month ORVI peddled falsehoods at a hearing convened by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management which is conducting a study on the prospects for a petrochemical industry in the Marcellus/Utica (see 
Robert Rapier, a chemical engineer in the energy industry, often writes for both the Forbes.com and OilPrice.com websites. Excellent writer. Rapier recently concluded a four-article series examining Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) programs in the oil industry, with an emphasis on how some companies are using hydrogen to improve their metrics. The last article in the series (below) tackles the issue of how hydrogen could/might/maybe become a “game-changer” for midstreamers in the oil and gas space. Our takeaway from reading his article is this…