Will New China Tariffs Hurt Marcellus/Utica LNG Exports?
The so-called trade war with China has just been ratcheted up a notch–by China. In a move to cut off their own nose to spite their face, the Chinese have hiked tariffs on LNG imports coming into their country from the United States–from a 10% tax to a 25% tax. Given only two LNG cargoes from the U.S. have landed in China this year, we suspect there won’t be any more LNG shipments from us to them for the foreseeable future. Depending on who you talk to, this is either no big deal, or a complete economic disaster for our shale gas industry.
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Several so-called environmental groups, including one calling itself the Sane Energy Project, converged on Albany, NY yesterday to protest two new natural gas pipeline projects. How many committed, dedicated, climate warriors showed up from these “several” groups? Thousands? Hundreds? How about two dozen. Nobody would have noticed the protest except sycophantic media outlets arrived to plaster the event all over the airwaves (and newsprint). Rather disheartening is that an 11-year-old boy who’s been brainwashed was among the protesters. Of course the media loved it.
A landowner in Jessup Borough (Lackawanna County, PA, near Scranton) has filed a lawsuit against the Borough Council as a whole (and the individuals who serve on it), claiming they rezoned the landowner’s property, cutting them out of millions of dollars, as retribution because the landowner had the audacity to sell property to the Marcellus gas-fired Lackawanna Energy Center (LEC) power plant.
TransCanada, which recently changed its name to TC Energy, is on a mission to sell more natural gas produced in Western Canada to New England and the East Coast of Canada. TC Energy’s Mainline pipeline system, that pretty much spans the continent, has just won its third rate cut by the Canadian National Energy Board (NEB), making Western Canadian gas that much cheaper to cart over 1,000 miles away to markets in the east.
Last week the Pennsylvania House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee held an informational meeting to hear from the regulated community, including the shale industry, on their experiences with Dept. of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) permit review processes. By all accounts legislators (and the DEP) got an earful.
Antis pinned their hopes that they could get the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to overturn a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approval for Dominion to build a couple of compressor stations in upstate New York, thereby forcing FERC to consider mythical man-made global warming in ALL pipeline decisions. The case had the makings of being a “landmark” case. Yesterday antis lost their landmark case when the court ruled the party bringing the lawsuit, Otsego 2000, didn’t have standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place.
Hey Westchester County, NY: You have a model to look at for your own moratorium on (blocking of) new natural gas customers. It’s located upstate, in Lansing, NY, just outside of college town Ithaca. The local utility (NYSEG) wanted to build a short pipeline in 2017 to supply new customers with natgas, but was blocked by crazies who irrationally hate fossil fuels (see 
Several members of the Marcellus Shale industry spoke at a meeting of the Williamsport/Lycoming Chamber of Commerce yesterday, including MDN friend George Stark from Cabot Oil & Gas. George is director of external affairs. At the meeting he said the Marcellus industry has made tremendous strides in the last 10 years and will be around for decades to come. He said, “It’s booming in our area.” George also said Cabot is having trouble filling vacant jobs.
Two Democrat New York State legislators, Senator Jen Metzger and Assemblywoman Nily Rozic, are floating parallel bills that would outright ban any new natural gas-fired electric plants or natural gas pipelines in the state. Really bizarre stuff. They’re calling this lunacy “Freedom from Fossil Fuels.” Want to run a new gas pipeline from the local utility to a new housing development or commercial business park? Forget it. No new gas customer hookups *anywhere* in the state–not just in Westchester County (see 
A radical Pennsylvania environmental group called PennEnvironment is pushing a media narrative that a “collection of 88 Republican and Democratic Pennsylvania state legislators” have joined together to introduce and endorse a truly insane plan that would require all (as in 100%) of electricity generated in the Keystone State to come from so-called renewables by 2050–just 30 years from now. It will NEVER happen, but that’s beside the point. Our point is that one named Republican is part of this “bipartisan collection” of 88 leftists. The lone Republican is PA State Sen. Tom Killion from the Philadelphia area.
Huntingdon County, PA landowner Ellen Gerhart, adamantly opposed to the Mariner East 2 pipeline being constructed across her land, tried to block construction on her property. She had her day in court last August and was found guilty of violating a judge’s previous order to stop interfering with construction (see 
Whew, that was close. We’ve had a concern that if Chevron ended up buying Anadarko Petroleum (for Anadarko’s Permian Basin oil assets), it might lead to Chevron pulling back from their drilling program in the Marcellus/Utica (see 
A Pennsylvania federal judge has ordered a former EQT employee to turn over his cell phone to EQT so they can have experts examine it for deleted text messages to Toby Rice and others helping him. You may recall EQT accused two fired workers of stealing company secrets and sharing those secrets with Toby and Derek Rice, who are trying to take over EQT (see 