Anti-Drilling/Fossil Fuel | Energy Services | Energy Transfer Partners | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Pipelines | Statewide PA | Sunoco Logistics
Sierra Club Hosts 90-Min Online Mariner East Pipeline Kvetch
Monday night the radical Sierra Club hosted a virtual town hall in which people could complain about the Mariner East 2 (ME2) pipeline project. And complain they did. The aim of the virtual complaint session is to try and close down the already up-and-running ME pipelines (plural), and most particularly prevent the final bit of ME2X from getting completed. By airing sob stories, the Clubbers are hoping to bully the state Dept. of Environmental Protection and/or the Governor into blocking further work on the project–a project just a few months from being done.
Read More “Sierra Club Hosts 90-Min Online Mariner East Pipeline Kvetch”
In June, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), in conjunction with the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), published final rules to allow specially constructed tanker cars for railroads (DOT-113 tank cars) to ship LNG (see 
Last December MDN told you about a second natural gas-fired power plant planned for Charles City County, Va. (near Richmond) being developed by C4GT (see 
On Monday we brought you the news that Gulfport Energy, the third-largest driller in the Ohio Utica Shale, had filed for bankruptcy over the weekend (see 
The Pennsylvania Senate previously passed and yesterday “concurred” (signed-off on) Senate Bill 790, sending it to Gov. Tom Wolf for his signature. SB 790 restores sanity to regulations for conventional oil and gas drillers in the Keystone State. Unfortunately, Gov. Wolf has stubbornly said he will veto this common sense bill. Why are we not surprised?
New England “doesn’t produce a barrel of crude oil, a gallon of NGLs, or a cubic foot of natural gas.” All of the considerable quantity of fossil fuels the region uses for energy must be brought in–by pipeline (very few pipelines), truck, ship, or rail. Propane is one of the primary heating fuels used in New England. Guess where the region’s propane comes from, and how it gets there?
Once again the price of natural gas traded on the Henry Hub in south Louisiana, the NYMEX December futures contract, has tanked. The price fell $0.30 yesterday to close at $2.70/Mcf. There were two primary reasons why: (1) The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) released a storage report last Friday showing storage levels are near record-highs (too much supply), and (2) longer range weather models show temps staying warm (not enough demand).
In August Southwestern Energy announced it is buying out and merging in Montage Resources in an all-stock deal (see 
Once again PTT Global Chemical is changing the timeline for a final investment decision (FID) to build a $10 billion ethane cracker plant in Belmont County, OH–for the umpteenth time. The most recent timeline had a decision coming by the end of this year or in the first quarter of next year. Whoops, they did it again! The new timeline is now “at least the middle of 2021.”
When a pipeline company considers whether or not to build a new pipeline, the company conducts an “open season”–a time when drillers (producers) can sign long-term contracts to use capacity along the pipeline. Such contracts guarantee pipeline companies will be able to make back the considerable amount of money they have to spend to build the pipeline. What happens when a driller that signed to a 10- or 20-year contract goes bankrupt? Or what happens if a contract will force a driller into bankruptcy? Can such a contract be canceled?
Here’s a little known fact: Fracking for natural gas in shale only extracts about 20% of the methane gas that’s trapped in shale rock, meaning (of course) that 80% of the gas gets left behind. Researchers with the Dept. of Energy’s (DOE) Los Alamos National Laboratory have made what we consider an astonishing breakthrough discovery: Too much pressure used during fracking actually locks some of the methane away tighter in the shale, instead of loosening it. In a published paper revealing their results (full copy below), researchers recommend a range of pressures to use to optimize (increase) recovery rates for methane in the Marcellus.
Like a bad Stephen King horror flick, the Sisters of the Corn (our name for a group of leftist nuns in Lancaster County, PA) have returned to file yet another frivolous lawsuit against Williams over a pipeline that crosses their land–a pipeline (Atlantic Sunrise) that has been up and running for years. The Sisters claim an infringement of their “religious liberties” in the lawsuit. They tried this argument once before and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.