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Exxon Mobil Sniffing Around SWPA to Build Second Cracker Plant
Leave it to ace reporter Paul Gough from the Pittsburgh Business Times to unearth some earth-shattering news–that ExxonMobil is actively looking at locations in Beaver County, Pennsylvania to potentially build a second multi-billion dollar cracker plant. Shell is already well along in building the region’s first ethane cracker–in Monaca (Beaver County). Will lightning strike twice for the good citizens of Beaver County? Maybe!
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The “bad old days” of low low prices for natural gas have returned to the Marcellus/Utica region–at least temporarily. During the past few weeks natural gas prices at Appalachian supply hubs Dominion South and Tennessee Zone 4 Marcellus fell from about $2 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) in mid-September to lows of 76¢/MMBtu and 65¢/MMBtu, respectively, on October 4. Ouch. Why the drop-like-a-rock in price? For a variety of reasons, but there are two main factors…
According to the EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration, our favorite government agency), in the coming month of November, the U.S.’s seven major shale plays will produce a combined 84 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of natural gas, and 8.9 million barrels of oil per day–a brand new record high for each. The real eye-opener is that while the M-U will produce 132 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of additional shale gas, the Permian Basin in West Texas and New Mexico will produce an additional 210 MMcf/d of shale gas!
Mountaineer Gas it close to completing Phase One of its Eastern Panhandle Expansion project in West Virginia, a 22.5-mile, 10-inch-diameter steel pipeline from Morgan County to Berkeley County. The project is designed to deliver Marcellus/Utica natural gas via local distribution channels to a new $150 million industrial facility in Berkeley County, WV, and to provide “a redundant supply” of gas to some 6,000 local businesses and residents in the Tri-State area. The system is supposed to be fed by a short 3.5-mile pipeline from Columbia Gas running under the Potomac River from Maryland into WV.
Sam Thigpen, founder and CEO of Thigpen Solutions, revealed something at Gulf Coast Energy Forum in New Orleans that is a revelation for us. Starting last winter, Thigpen and his Texas-based company has been shipping LNG to National Grid and their Long Island, NY operation during the wintertime, so that National Grid doesn’t run out of gas for its existing customers. In fact, Thigpen has a five-year contract to supply National Grid’s Long Island customers with (expensive) LNG.
For residents who want to build a new home or business in either Northampton or Easthampton (Hampshire County), Massachusetts, and connect to natural gas supplies–you can forget about it. Columbia Gas of Massachusetts has announced that a moratorium on new natural gas customers in those two municipalities, in place since 2015, will become permanent. Citing “cost impacts and benefits” to customers, Columbia’s president says the company will no longer build what it called the “alternate backfeed” pipeline project–a 6-mile pipe that would have run between Agawam and Holyoke to supply Northampton and Easthampton.
In August, Enterprise Products Partners, the builder and operator of the Appalachia-to-Texas Express (ATEX) ethane pipeline, launched an open season to gauge interest in expanding the capacity along the 1,192-mile pipeline (see 
Sounding like North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Friday “ordered” National Grid to connect 1,157 new natural gas customers previously denied service because National Grid won’t have enough natural gas on the coldest days in winter to service everyone. New York has descended into a police state, with our Dear Leader ordering around companies in contravention of established law. Yet not a peep from mainstream news organizations about Cuomo’s excessive abuse of power.
We’ve seen this movie before. The radical fringe leftists from the Sierra Club (disgusting organization) convinced the clown judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (i.e. Circus) to block construction of Dominion Energy’s 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) pipeline by getting the court to toss U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permits that allow the project to kill a couple of bats along a few miles of the project (see 
How would you like to find out that your billion dollar pipeline project has just been denied another permit–by getting a tweet? That’s what happened to PennEast Pipeline on Friday. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy tweeted that NJ’s Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) is, once again, denying a federal Clean Water Act Section 401 stream crossing permit for the project. The putz delivered the news to PennEast via a tweet–can you believe that? The NJ DEP is rejecting the permit not for any scientific reasons, which is what the law stipulates, but because of politics.
Last year the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued administrative orders requiring three oil and gas companies–Alliance Petroleum Corporation (a subsidiary of Diversified Gas & Oil), XTO Energy, and CNX Resources–to plug 1,058 abandoned oil and gas wells across Pennsylvania (see 
What happens when two of three elected town supervisors either have a lease with a pipeline company, or have close family members who have leases with the pipeline company, and they must vote to approve a new power plant project that would use shale gas from that pipeline to power it? It’s called a conflict of interest, and we’re about to find out the answer to that question in Robinson Township (Washington County), PA.
National Grid, the electric and natural gas utility company that serves part of New York City and all of Long Island, has been the target of a smear campaign by New York Gov. Cuomo, who ordered his Dept. of Environment Conservation (DEC) to reject the Williams Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline project in May (see 