Mountain Valley Pipe Asks FERC for 2-Yr Extension to Finish Project
It’s been an uphill battle to complete Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a 303-mile Marcellus/Utica gas pipeline from Wetzel County, WV to Pittsylvania County, VA. The project has been vigorously opposed by radical environmentalists from the beginning. Frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit has been filed by Big Green groups bankrolled by billionaires. Finally in June Equitrans, the builder, said they should be able to complete the 92% done pipeline by next spring (see Mountain Valley Pipe Will be Done and In-Service Early 2021). That is now in doubt. MVP made an official request with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to extend the completion deadline by an extra two years.
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Oil and gas drilling giant Equinor (formerly called Statoil) is owned by the Norwegian government. Equinor/Statoil has drilled in the Marcellus/Utica for years. As recently as June 2019 the company reported drilling 9-14 Utica wells per year (see 
We have chronicled the break between trade unions and Pennsylvania. Gov. Tom Wolf over Wolf’s stubborn insistence on forcing the state to join a carbon tax scheme called RGGI–the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (
Democrats are nothing if not creative. A leftist Democrat in the Virginia legislature, Del. Chris Hurst (Montgomery County) has introduced a bill to try and kill the remaining construction of the 92% complete Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP). Dems couldn’t stop the project in the courts. They couldn’t stop it with nutjobs living in the tops of trees for months on end. They couldn’t get lefty Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam to stop it. So now they’re trying this: A bill that would require *any* company hiring a crew of 50 or more “temporary” workers during the COVID-19 pandemic to receive prior approval from the Democrat Commissioner of Dept. of Labor and Industry first.
On August 24, 31 radicalized Big Green groups from across Pennsylvania sent a letter to the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary Pat McDonnell demanding (they always demand) the DEP immediately and permanently revoke all Mariner East construction permits and prohibit the issuance of any future permits. Yeah, just stop the pipeline, which is about 98% done, from ever getting completed. What else can you say except it’s demented? Nobody in their right mind would reasonably request or expect the DEP to simply stop the project permanently.
The leftists who run and write the Scranton Times-Tribune are at it again–doing anything and everything they can to destroy the Marcellus industry that singlehandedly has created more new jobs and raised the standard of living for more people in northeastern PA than any other industry in the past generation–the Marcellus industry. The new target for Times-Tribune is a proposed $800 million LNG liquefaction plant in Wyalusing, PA (in nearby Bradford County). The Times-Tribune editors say the plan to build the plant and transport the LNG via rail is too “risky” and northeast PA will be just fine without an extra $800 million and hundreds of jobs. Dopes.
Our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), maintains a list of pipeline projects going back to 1996. Based on that list EIA recently published an article on their Today in Energy site pointing out during the first half of 2020 some 5 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of new natgas pipeline capacity (across the entire country) came online. They also point out some 8.7 Bcf/d of previously planned new pipe capacity was canceled in 2020, including Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Constitution Pipeline, both here in the M-U region. We grabbed the spreadsheet of the 145 active and/or canceled pipelines in 2020 and trimmed it down to show the list of pipelines active or canceled that have the potential to flow M-U molecules. Our list (below) shows 41 active pipe projects and 4 canceled projects.
A group of far-left, so-called environmental groups, including, Earthjustice, Buckeye Environmental Network, Concerned Ohio River Residents, Freshwater Accountability Project, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and the Sierra Club, are suing the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) in an attempt to overturn permits issued by ODNR to build an underground NGL storage hub in Monroe County, Ohio.
While drilling in Chester County in the Marsh Creek State Park two weeks ago, Energy Transfer’s Mariner East 2X pipeline experienced an “inadvertent return”–nontoxic drilling mud coming up out of the ground where it’s not supposed to (see 
Eureka Resources, which operates three frack wastewater treatment facilities in the Marcellus Shale, is doing some really cool stuff. Last October the company began extracting lithium from Marcellus wastewater at one of its plants in Bradford County, PA (see 
FirstEnergy Solutions (now called Energy Harbor) allegedly paid $60 million in bribes to (now former) Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and four of his associates to gain their assistance in passing the hugely unpopular House Bill 6 (see 
CNX was fracking their Shaw 1G Utica well in Washington Township (Westmoreland County) in early 2019 when they detected “a strong drop in pressure” and stopped fracking (see