Politics: North Carolina Rejects MVP Southgate Pipe Permits
Democrat governors across the country are now mimicking the example set by the dictator of New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo abuses state power to reject fossil fuel projects (unconstitutional in our opinion), telling NY’s state environmental agency to reject all new pipelines. Roy Cooper, governor of North Carolina, is the latest Cuomo wannabe. Cooper instructed his state’s environmental agency, the Dept. of Environmental Quality (DEQ), to reject permits for Equitrans’ proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) Southgate project. Which the DEQ did yesterday. The agency tried to disguise the rejection using lame excuses, but the reason for the rejection was politics, plain and simple.
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Underground horizontal directional drilling (HDD) for the Mariner East 2 pipelines (two of them, 2 and 2X) have a history of springing leaks. They’re called “inadvertent returns”–when you drill horizontally underground for a pipeline and the drilling mud you put down the hole pops up in a place it’s not supposed to. The good news is that the drilling mud is non-toxic, the same stuff used in toothpaste. The bad news is that it can overwhelm little fishies and other aquatic life and kill (suffocate) them. ME2X drilling had another such incident earlier this week–in Chester County, PA.
Our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), is singing a different tune than it did less than two months ago. In late June, EIA published a post discussing the drastic drop in U.S. LNG (liquefied natural gas) exports, saying a recovery to pre-COVID levels would not happen until sometime next year (see 
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) granted permission to Kinder Morgan to begin service on train #10 at KM’s Elba Island LNG export facility, located near Savannah, Georgia. KM’s Elba project consists of 10 mini-trains, each capable of liquefying 0.3 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) of LNG–or roughly 40 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of natural gas. There’s just one train left to bring online…
Summit Midstream Partners, formed in 2009 and headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas, operates natural gas, crude oil and produced water gathering (pipeline) systems in six unconventional resource basins, including the Marcellus and Utica. The company concentrates its time and money on four “core focus areas” including the Utica, the Williston (i.e. Bakken), the DJ Basin and the Permian. The Marcellus is part of the company’s “legacy” systems that doesn’t get as much love (and money). Last week the company issued its 2Q update. The company’s Utica operation was the star performer in 2Q, increasing flows through Summit’s system by 60%.
Two different trade unions are asking some great questions about Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s plan to force the state to join the so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a carbon tax on coal and gas-fired electric generating plants. For example, how would a $2.36 BILLION carbon tax reduce carbon dixoide emissions any more than is already happening by the use of natural gas? PA already reduced CO2 emissions by 32% over the same time period RGGI (a coalition of liberal northeastern states) began–far more of a reduction than RGGI states have experienced!–without belonging to the RGGI tax plan.
The onshore rig count continues to bump along near the bottom. A few weeks ago we noted that after hitting bottom, the Enverus rig count had once again started to climb (see 
It’s been a loooong road getting the Mariner East 2 (ME2) pipeline system, which includes building two pipelines side-by-side from eastern Ohio across Pennsylvania to the Philadelphia area, done. From what we can tell, ME2 is now done–with the possible exception of a few miles where smaller pipeline is being used until a bigger replacement is done. For all intents, ME2 is done. However, ME2X, a second pipeline being built next to the first, is not yet done. But it’s getting close! According to comments from Energy Transfer (ET) made during a quarterly conference call yesterday, ME2X will be in service by the end of this year, and the entire project will be done-done sometime in 2Q21. Finally!
Most of the layoffs during this particularly brutal (and historic) downturn in the oil and gas market have taken place in oilfield services companies like Halliburton, Baker Hughes and Sclumberger. But exploration & production companies are not immune. Chevron is laying off workers in their Marcellus/Utica operation because the company is selling all of its Appalachian assets and leaving the region (see 
In February MDN told you about an effort by the radicalized Sierra Club to block a New York landfill from accepting drill cuttings from the Pennsylvania Marcellus (see