Biased Hit Piece in Columbus Dispatch Attacks M-U Waste Facility
A “reporter” at the Columbus Dispatch has just published a hatchet job on a shale waste handling and processing facility located in Belmont County, OH. The facility is located (gasp!) a half-mile away from a high school and a hospital. It’s also located near the Ohio River and it handles (gasp!) “radioactive waste.” That’s how the article begins. It goes downhill from there, making wild claims of “overflowing barrels” of radioactive waste at the facility.
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Here’s a peer-reviewed, published research study you won’t read about in mainstream media. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Penn State University, and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation recently published research in The Electricity Journal (full copy below) detailing how much money it cost New England electric ratepayers in 2014 when there was a cold-weather event that caused a shortage of natural gas used for power plants, due to lack of pipelines. New Englanders paid $1.8 BILLION for that one event in skyrocketed electric rates–due to the folly of their elected leaders in blocking new pipelines to the region.
Three far-left Democrat judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit have attacked the Marcellus/Utica by overturning a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approval for a long-completed and flowing natural gas pipeline in the St. Louis, MO area–a pipeline that flows M-U gas to residents, businesses, and electric generating plants in the region. The Spire STL pipeline now faces closure. It is a 
The price of natural gas traded on “forward” contracts for the fall at what used to be called the Dominion South (now called Eastern Gas Transmission) trading hub near Pittsburgh is up 23 cents (14%) for contracts in September and October. Forward prices are based on current spot prices. Translation: The market is strongly indicating it thinks the price of M-U gas is heading higher in the coming fall months.
An interesting post by our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) about their latest predictions for the price of natural gas at the benchmark Henry Hub. EIA predicts the average price at HH this year, in 2021, will end up being around $3.07 per million British thermal units (MMBtu). The average in 2020 was $1.998 (round it up to $2.00). So this year the average price will be some 54% higher than last year. What about 2022?
We have published a number of posts about hydrogen (H2), the next “big thing” in energy (
The West Virginia Dept. of Environmental Protection (WV DEP) is moving forward with its constitutional duty to evaluate whether or not the state should issue a federal Clean Water Act permit allowing Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) to finish crossing water bodies it hasn’t already crossed under a previous permit (which was overturned by the lefties of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit). WV DEP will hold an online, virtual hearing tonight at 6 pm to accept comments from the public.
Last week CenterPoint Energy filed a request with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) to replace portions of its coal-fired generation fleet with two natural gas combustion turbines. The two units would provide a combined 460 megawatts (MW) of electricity as a backup to CenterPoint’s wind, solar, and battery storage. The plants would not operate continuously (which is a shame). Where will the gas come from to feed these new gas-fired plants?
We spotted an article on OilPrice.com (no friend of the oil and gas industry, despite the name of the site) that makes the bold claim that “oilfield services companies are making a full comeback.” That’s music to our ears! Oilfield services companies including Schlumberger, Halliburton, Baker Hughes, and National Oilwell Varco are reporting that prices for their services and equipment have “bottomed out” and they are now recruiting new workers. Since February some 27,000 OFS laid-off workers have returned to work.
In March we told you about House of Representatives (HR) Bill 1512, the Climate Leadership and Environmental Action for our Nation’s Future Act (or CLEAN Future Act). The bill gives vast powers to the unelected bureaucrats at the EPA to set new regulatory demands before permits can be approved for facilities that produce plastics or the raw materials used to produce plastics, such as ethylene or propylene (see 
If you’ve been reading MDN over the past few months, no doubt you’ve detected our skepticism over the sudden rise of ESG (environmental, social, governance) programs that are now all the rage with oil and gas companies, including Marcellus/Utica companies. As we previously stated, “We’re approaching the point where we’ll puke if we hear much more about ESG. The problem, from our perspective, is that the term itself is nebulous. Anyone can define ESG any way they want. What does ESG really mean?” So when we spotted an article titled “How to tell a real oil and gas ESG program from a fake,” we just had to read it.
We finally come to the end of a saga that began nearly three years ago, in Sept. 2018 when six men were charged with conspiring to illegally alter emissions systems on 30+ trucks with heavy-duty diesel engines, trucks used to haul water and wastewater to and from Marcellus Shale wells (see 
In May MDN brought you the news that landowner Gateway Royalty was sounding the alarm over a new bill quickly advancing in the Ohio legislature. House Bill (HB) 152 would use forced pooling if 65% of a proposed unit’s landowners are leased (too low a bar) and also would force the landowner to accept a 12.5% royalty and force them to accept post-production deductions with royalties in some cases potentially going down to nothing (see