Energy Services | Energy Transfer Partners | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Pipelines | Regulation | Statewide PA
Energy Transfer 3Q – Mariner East Shines, Revolution Back Soon
Energy Transfer (ET), the big pipeline company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, issued its third quarter 2019 update yesterday. ET is the builder of the Rover Pipeline in the Utica Shale, the Mariner East trio of pipelines in the PA Marcellus, and the Revolution gathering system in southwestern PA. With Rover built and fully operational, our interest was in locating information/updates on the ME and Revolution projects. We hit paydirt in yesterday’s update.
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We often spot stories in the press about the price of natural gas for end-user customers going down. A utility here and a utility there will announce a rate reduction. Most of the time we don’t bring you those kinds of stories because they’re pretty common. However, we spotted a story that’s different. The Public Service Commission in West Virginia says natural gas utility companies that serve 91% of the gas customers in the state have filed requests to LOWER the rates they charge for their gas–thanks to abundant supplies of Marcellus Shale gas being extracted in the state.
New York’s Attorney General has viciously gone after ExxonMobil in state court hoping to prove the company knew, for years, that burning its oil and gas would lead to so-called man-made global warming and eventually kill the planet. And, says the vicious AG, Exxon covered it up from investors because someday their stock will be worthless when everyone finds out, and they don’t want investors to know about it just yet. The AG is trying to prove the company has engaged in securities fraud.
Even though the oil and gas industry is currently going through another “down” cycle, make no mistake–some of the best and highest paying jobs in the country are still to be found in the fossil fuel industry. We have a list of the top 10 highest paying jobs below. We’ll state right up front they all require an advanced degree–bachelor’s degree or higher. But man oh man, do they pay! In 2018 some 1.5 million people were employed directly in the oil and gas industry, and another 1.2 million are employed in the closely-related power generation industry.
In 2011 Ohio Gov. John Kasich (RINO) signed into law a provision to create the Ohio Oil and Gas Leasing Commission, a group to oversee drilling and fracking on state-owned land. Then Kasich refused to appoint members to the five-member commission, effectively skirting the law and imposing his own whacked moratorium on drilling on state-owned land. Why? Punishment for the industry refusing to endorse his obscene high severance tax rate. In 2017 under threat by the Republican legislature, Kasich finally relented and appointed the five members (see 
Do Rhode Island regulators read MDN? Maybe! On Monday we brought you a post about the coming natural gas outages like that experienced last January in the People’s Republic of Rhode Island, due to eco-socialist pressure to ban new natural gas infrastructure (see 
In June 2017, the Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Foundation (PEDF) won a case at the PA Supreme Court by the skin of their teeth (see 
The smart folks at IHS Markit, a global analytics company that tracks data in the oil and gas industry, are predicting a major slowdown in shale oil production in 2020, and essentially no growth in production for 2021. Although this prediction, based on evidence and the intuition of people who study this stuff is about shale oil, the prediction *does* relate to the Marcellus/Utica as well.
Consolidated Edison, the huge gas and electric utility that services much of New York City and its suburbs, recently said the company will cap its investment in the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) project. There is an amount beyond which they will not go. Con Ed is one of five investor/owners of MVP. The primary owner and builder of MVP is Equitrans (EQM Midstream Partners), the former EQT Midstream.
This is a huge disappointment. In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a precedent-setting decision that disallows PennEast Pipeline from using the federally-delegated power of eminent domain to cross properties either owned by, or with easements granted to, the state of New Jersey (see 
Yesterday MDN reported on Dominion Energy’s third quarter update from last Friday, a session in which CEO Tom Farrell commented the company’s commitment to building the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) is “unwavering” (see 
For some time we have criticized the 100 year-old Jones Act that prevents LNG carriers built and/or crewed by other counties from transporting LNG from one U.S. port to another U.S. port (see 
Dominion Energy released their third quarter 2019 update late last week. The company reports earnings of $975 million ($1.17 per share), an increase of 14.2% from the previous year. Dominion, as you may know, is a huge company involved in not only the pipeline business, but the utility business. They generate and deliver electricity to millions of customers. They deliver natural gas to millions of customers. The key issue right now for us with regard to Dominion is the status of their Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) project. CEO Tom Farrell says that ACP is still a go.
Before environmentalist wackos got really wacko in opposing *anything* remotely related to natural gas, including gas-fired powered plants, Competitive Power Ventures got their 680-megawatt CPV Valley Energy Center in Wawayanda (Orange County), NY approved and (eventually) built and online (see