SE PA Politicians Introduce Bills to Prevent Future Pipeline Development
Weak-kneed, swamp-dwelling politicians from the Philadelphia area continue to ratchet up the noise on stopping all work for the Mariner East 2 Pipeline. State Sen. Andy Dinniman (Democrat from the 19th District) and State Sen. John Rafferty (RINO from the 44th District) say the impacts of ME2’s construction are “unacceptable.” A few of their loudmouthed constituents (mostly likely members of Big Green groups) are complaining to these weak-kneed politicians and in turn the politicians have introduced four new bills in the PA Senate that will not do a @#$% thing about ME2, but will potentially stop future pipeline projects in the state. The aim of the bills is to tie up pipeline projects with so much red tape in various reviews, and by paying new fees for so-called “safety” measures, as to make the pipelines unbuildable. Here’s the latest effort from the Philly area to derail the Marcellus miracle in PA…
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Two African-American Marcellus Shale natural gas workers in the Williamsport, PA area claim they were fired, twice, based in part on their race. The two filed a lawsuit against STI Group (a staffing agency) and Chesapeake Energy. The case was thrown out by U.S. Middle District of Pennsylvania Court, but later reinstated on appeal by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. Rather than let the case drag out endlessly, STI and Chesapeake have just settled it. The amount of money they had to pay to make it go away was not disclosed. Workers are hired and fired all the time. Ours is a boom/bust industry. Was this really a case of racism? Or just a case of boom and bust? You read the details and decide for yourself…
Every now and again MDN editor Jim Willis attends a conference or seminar that reminds him how parochial we in the natural gas industry sometimes are. We often (understandably) have our heads down, focused on who’s drilling where and fretting over how we’ll get that gas to market. Sometimes it’s good to lift your head up and observe the entire energy landscape. Natural gas is one piece of the puzzle. An important piece, to be sure! But still, just one piece. Trends in coal, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro–they all play a part in the larger picture. The world of energy is dynamic and changing. New solar plants going up in Japan actually DO have an impact on Marcellus gas production–because that means Japan may decrease its LNG imports–which potentially would come from our LNG exports. You get the picture. This past May the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) held a one-day workshop with government, industry, and policy experts, to explore the outlook for U.S. natural gas markets in the global energy landscape. In November they condensed the material from that workshop into a report. Below is a full copy of that report. This will help you (as it does us) think about the bigger picture and where we here in the Marcellus/Utica fit into that picture…
A Bradford County, PA judge has turned down Chesapeake Energy’s attempt to wiggle out of a royalty lawsuit on a technicality. However, the judge also punted the case to a higher court to settle what he calls “novel questions of law”–rather than spending more time and money on such issues at the county court level. This is good news for landowners in Bradford County who have been shafted by Chesapeake’s royalty scheme to shift the cost of piping and processing to landowners by using inflated values for those services. In December 2015, Pennsylvania’s felony-indicted Attorney General, Kathleen Kane (now gone), brought a lawsuit against Chesapeake Energy, Anadarko and Williams accusing them of, among other things, royalty fraud (see 
For months Dominion’s top brass has signaled that the country’s newest LNG export facility, Cove Point (situated along the coast of Maryland), would begin full commercial operations “by the end of this year” (see 
A group of landowners in Ohio calling themselves the Coalition to Reroute Nexus (CORN), whom we affectionately call CORNballs, filed a lawsuit in federal court in May against the NEXUS pipeline project (see 
The Millennium Pipeline stretches ~244 miles from Independence in Steuben County, NY to Buena Vista in Rockland County, NY. The Millennium, which is supplied by local production and storage fields and interconnecting upstream pipelines, serves customers along its route in New York’s Southern Tier region and helps meet the energy needs of northeast markets. In August 2016, the Millennium filed an application for what it calls its Eastern System Upgrade (see 
It’s full speed ahead for Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP)–a $3.5 billion, 303-mile pipeline that will run from Wetzel County, WV to the Transco Pipeline in Pittsylvania County, VA. In October, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) gave final approval for the project (see 
By our reckoning, Antero Resources’ $275 million wastewater recycling facility in Doddridge County, WV is now operational (see 
Yesterday our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), issued our favorite monthly report, the Drilling Productivity Report (DPR). The DPR is the EIA’s best guess, based on expert data crunchers, as to how much each of the U.S.’s seven major shale plays will produce for both oil and natural gas in the coming month. EIA has adjusted their previous prediction for December’s natural gas production from 61.7 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) to 62.3 Bcf/d. Wow! Not only that, EIA predicts average production in January 2018 will hit 63 Bcf/d–yet another record high in a string of successive monthly record highs going back more than a year. The 800-pound gorilla is, of course, the Marcellus/Utica region. Our region will add another 347 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of natural gas production from December to January. Yikes! Of the seven major shale play regions tracked in the DRP, Appalachia (the Marcellus/Utica) represents a full 42% of total U.S. production! Our region is a MONSTER natural gas producer. Here’s the latest DPR, along with some analysis from Reuters…
In November MDN shared the exciting news that an old oil pipeline stretching from Northampton County, PA through Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester counties, terminating in Delaware County at Marcus Hook, had been purchased by a subsidiary of New Jersey Resources and will get converted to flow more Marcellus natural gas to the greater Philadelphia region (see 
It’s GO-TIME at the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). GO-TIME stands for Governor’s Office of Transformation, Innovation, Management and Efficiency. In English, please! “Eliminate paper by using electronic devices.” Yesterday DEP Deputy Secretary for Oil and Gas Management Scott Perry said that by dumping paper and using apps on iPads, oil and gas inspectors save goodles of time by not filling out paperwork “back at the office” and instead stay in the field longer. All of which means that even with using less inspectors in 2017, the DEP actually increased the number of well site inspections by an extra 2,000 over 2016, saving the agency half a million dollars. It’s about time the DEP came into the 21st century. Now if we could only get them to speed up well permit approvals…
The Lansing, Michigan Board of Water & Light (BWL) announced yesterday it will build a brand new $500 million natural gas-fired power plant. The new plant will generate 250 megawatts of electricity, create 1,200 construction jobs, and go online in 2021. The plant will be located at the Erickson Power Station facility in Delta Township as part of its Lansing Energy Tomorrow plan, replacing (and retiring) BWL’s coal-fired Eckert plant at that location. Out with old, in with the new. Why report about a new gas-fired power plant in Michigan here on MDN? Because the mighty Rover Pipeline, which is due to be completed and online by the end of March 2018, terminates very close to Lansing (see the map below). While we’ve not spotted any stories indicating where the gas will come from to feed the new Lansing plant, we’d wager a lot of money that at least some–perhaps most/all–of the gas to feed the plant will come from the Utica/Marcellus, gas hitching a ride along the Rover Pipeline. The nuts from the Sierra Club are ecstatic that BWL will close the coal plant, but opposed to building a clean-burning natural gas plant. Some people are never happy…
Last Friday MDN told you about three proposed new injection wells planned for the Town of Brookfield, in Trumbull County, OH (see 
Freedom in New York State is all but gone–snuffed out by a corrupt dictator by the name of Andrew Cuomo. Warning to other states: Be careful who you elect in high office. Cuomo is not content to simply destroy the drilling industry in NY–he wants to destroy anything to do with fossil fuels. Crude oil from the Bakken in North Dakota has, for some time, arrived in New York’s capitol city of Albany via rail cars where the oil is loaded on barges at the Port of Albany for a quick trip down the Hudson River. Cuomo went after those rail shipments, trying to slow them down or stop them altogether (see