EIA Says NGL Production Will Grow Massively in Marcellus/Utica
The U.S. Energy Information Administration recently published its Annual Energy Outlook for 2019. Among the numbers EIA released are predictions about how much natural gas liquids (NGLs) the U.S. will produce between 2018 and 2050. EIA says production will go up 32% over that period, to 5.8 million barrels per day (b/d). Guess where most of that increase will come?
Read More “EIA Says NGL Production Will Grow Massively in Marcellus/Utica”
Here’s an interesting twist on the theme of drillers shorting leaseholders out of royalty money. Usually such cases involve drillers claiming post-production deductions from landowner royalty checks. This time the landowner/rightsholder is Columbia Gas Transmission (pipeline company owned by midstream giant TransCanada), and the claim is that Southwestern Energy (driller) is not paying royalties for gas produced but not actually sold.
The folks who keep track of these things expect today’s record-cold polar vortex in the Midwest and northeast (coldest temps in more than a generation, hey, what was that about global warming?) will create the highest demand/usage of natural gas for a single day–ever. Prognosticators also predict a “freeze-off” in the Marcellus/Utica, causing a temporary 1 Bcf/d decrease in production.
Canadian pipeline giant TransCanada, which owns the Columbia Pipeline system here in the U.S., blames the Marcellus/Utica for a huge drop in volumes flowing through its Canadian Mainline from Western Canada to Ontario and Quebec.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) office of enforcement is close to launching a new audit policy “that will offer significant new penalty reductions for the oil and gas industry.” That’s how the news is being spun–that oil and gas are about to get a big, fat, wet, sloppy kiss from the EPA. The truth is far different from the media spin.
As we have noted recently in a number of posts, it appears we’re heading into a dip of drilling activity–not only in the oil plays but also here at home in the Marcellus/Utica (see 
Equitrans’ (EQT Midstream) 300-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) is now 70% built (see 
MDN previously reported on efforts in both Ohio and Pennsylvania to plug orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells (all of them conventional/vertical wells), which present a health and safety issue. It’s all too easy to hit one of these old wells when drilling a new horizontal shale well. In WV, a new effort to plug old wells is causing concern for some–that the effort to plug old wells may inflict economic damage on WV counties. Huh?!
It seems the rather thick-headed governors from New England have finally woken up and understand their resistance to new natural gas pipelines has placed them in a pickle. The region, when it gets really cold (like over the next few days), gets really short on natural gas. Prices soar, supplies diminish, and people not only pay high natgas prices, but high prices for electricity, which gets generated by natgas. The govs have a plan to slap a Band Aid on the problem.
How is it not child abuse to brainwash young kids with your particular brand of sick environmental radicalism? That’s apparently what THE Delaware Riverkeeper herself has done–brainwashed little kids.