Enbridge Buys NW Ohio Pipe – Flows Utica Gas to Toledo
Holy Toledo! Enbridge, a really big pipeline company headquartered in Calgary, Canada, is in the process of buying the 23-mile Generation Pipeline located in northwest Ohio for $100 million. Enbridge owns the Texas Eastern Transmission Company (Tetco), as well as a 50% share in the NEXUS Utica Shale pipeline in the Marcellus/Utica region. It is that later project, NEXUS, that prompted Enbridge to pursue a purchase of Generation Pipeline.
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Another chapter in the long-drawn-out saga of the effort to build a 22-mile pipeline in New Jersey. In February MDN reported that New Jersey radicals had succeeded in scuttling a plan to convert an old coal-fired electric plant into using natural gas (see 
The best teachers (people) and the best teacher (method of instruction) have the same thing in common: Hands on. As in tactile, doing stuff, rather than sitting in a chair attempting to learn by information dumping. Particularly with elementary-age kiddies. Cabot Oil & Gas and Southwestern Energy recently sponsored the annual Vehicular Career Day where 400 fifth graders from school districts across Susquehanna County climbed into big rigs, buses, and emergency vehicles. The shale industry was well-represented. Needless to say, the kids loved it.
Speaking of the exploded Revolution Pipeline located in southwestern Pennsylvania that’s led to a driller declaring bankruptcy (see EdgeMarc Energy Files for Bankruptcy, Blames Revolution Pipe Outage), yesterday the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued an order to Energy Transfer, builder of Revolution, to “identify and restore or mitigate all streams and wetlands that it illegally eliminated or altered during the construction” of the pipeline. DEP claims ET “illegally” eliminated at least 23 streams and changed the length of another 120 streams.
Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), being built by Equitrans (formerly EQT Midstream), has just agreed to pay a $265,972 fine and submit a plan of corrective action to West Virginia state regulators to fix storm water runoff caused when building the 303-mile pipeline in the Mountain State.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has just upheld a lower court opinion that allows shale drilling to happen *anywhere* in a township, so long as such drilling satisfies standards to protect public health, safety and welfare. This is the end of the road for a lawsuit funded by Big Green that began in 2015 in Westmoreland County, PA.
Advanced Power Services finally breaks ground…TODAY…on building an 1,100 megawatt Utica-fired electric plant in Columbiana County, OH (see
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette seems to be doing its best to tie what it calls a “cancer cluster” to local shale drilling in the region. We first noticed a developing story about a potential cluster of rare Ewing sarcoma cancer cases among children in the Pittsburgh region a few months ago, when Pittsburgh media first began to report on it.
In the coming month, the U.S.’s seven major shale plays will produce a cumulative 80.7 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of natural gas, the first time shale production has passed that milestone. Yesterday our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, issued our favorite monthly report, the Drilling Productivity Report. The DPR is a forecast of oil and gas production in the country’s major shale plays for the coming month, made by the expert number crunchers at EIA. The Marcellus/Utica is forecast to increase production an amazing 1/3 Bcf in the next 30 days, for a second month in a row.
Guess we should have seen this one coming. Last week MDN told you that U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected an appeal by the rich snobs from Cooperstown that call themselves Otsego 2000, challenging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) approval of Dominion Energy’s New Market Project to build two new compressor stations in Upstate NY (see
You know who anti-vaxxers are, right? The parents who won’t give their children vaccines because they fear the vaccines may give their kids autism or allergies. Because of this anti-vaxxer movement, there’s been a recent resurgence in measles–particularly in New York City. A group calling themselves Physicians for Social Responsibility is trotting out scare tactics to oppose a pipeline compressor station in Weymouth, Massachusetts. One writer calls them the anti-vaxxers of energy. We love it!
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.
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.