Eastern Shore Files with FERC to Expand Delmarva Pipeline
In July 2016 MDN told you about a smallish, but important pipeline project in the Delmarva Peninsula area, which includes most of Delaware and portions of Maryland and Virginia. Eastern Shore Natural Gas’ 2017 System Expansion project will bring new sources of natgas from an interconnection Eastern Shore has with the mighty TETCo (Texas Eastern Company) pipeline near Philadelphia (see PA/MD/DE Pipeline Project Heats Up with Open House Mtgs This Week). Although Eastern Shore, a subsidiary of Chesapeake Utilities Corporation, ran a non-binding open season in 2015, and although they pre-filed for the expansion project in May 2016, they have only just filed a full, official application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Originally the project was slated to run ~33 miles of pipeline looping in PA, MD and DE. That number seems to have gone down, to 23 miles. Compressor upgrades and other pipeline will also be added. Chesapeake Utilities, the parent company, calls the project the single largest such expansion in Eastern Shore’s history, a project that will bump up gas delivery volumes by 25%…
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Two radical Pennsylvania-based “environmental” groups are not exactly merging–but almost. One group is the radical PennFuture, which gave rise to such luminaries as John Quigley (fired as Sec. of the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection), John Hanger (left the state, former DEP Secretary, ran for governor last time, lost, supports legalizing pot), and Cindy Dunn (currently Secretary of Dept. of Conservation and Natural Resources). PennFuture is tax exempt, yet it routinely engages in political activity in violation of its IRS 501(c)(3) status. The other group is Conservation Voters of PA, a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization affiliated with a political action committee (PAC). The two groups are combining certain portions of their operations–“policy, advocacy, and legal resources”–in an attempt to “hold legislators accountable, mobilize voters, and shine a spotlight on candidates’ records on clean air, water and energy issues.” Our view is that their organizations’ membership and donations are dwindling and this is two failing organizations clinging to each other so they don’t slip beneath the waves into oblivion…
Can you actually use a mathematical formula to figure out better ways to plan how to drill shale gas wells? It turns out the answer to that question is a resounding, “Yes!” A chemical engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, along with several Ph.D. students have, working with EQT, pioneered research that figured out how to turn 14,000 water truck trips to a well site into 1,400 trips–an “order of magnitude” difference. That is a big deal in the drilling industry. Using mathematical formulas–something called “mixed-integer optimization”–Professor Ignacio Grossmann and the other researchers tackled how to make processes in the shale gas industry more efficient. They published a paper in the AIChE Journal in 2016 titled, “Strategic Planning, Design and Development of the Shale Gas Supply Chain Network” (full copy below). The paper “presents a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model to optimally determine the number of wells to drill at every location, the size of gas processing plants, the section and length of pipelines for gathering raw gas and delivering processed gas and by-products, the power of gas compressors, and the amount of freshwater required from reservoirs for drilling and hydraulic fracturing so as to maximize the economics of the project.” Er, right. As you can tell, it’s complex. But it’s also very interesting and relevant for drillers and others in the industry, which is why we bring it to you. Below is a quick summary/overview of the paper, a video of Prof. Grossmann describing the research, and a copy of the paper itself…
Some 200 leftist/radical bought-and-paid-for “protesters” (paid by Big Green groups) “rallied” in downtown Philadelphia yesterday in front of both of PA’s U.S. Senate office (Bob Casey, total jerk and Democrat hack, and Pat Toomey, marginal Republican). They were protesting President-elect Trump’s picks to run the EPA, Dept. of Energy and Dept. of Interior–calling them “climate deniers.” This is part of a national campaign paid for by radical environmental groups, like 350.org and the Sierra Club, groups totally invested in the theory that mankind is causing the earth to catastrophically heat up–even though the temperature record doesn’t back up the theory. Holding silly banners like “NO CLIMATE DENIAL CABINET” they paraded around, collected their paychecks, 
In October 2014 Dominion announced they had officially broken ground on the Cove Point LNG export plant, a project that will inject between $3.4 and $3.8 billion in Calvert County, Maryland and pump upward of 1.8 billion cubic feet per day of cheap, abundant Marcellus and Utica Shale gas (see 
Science, as in the storied journal, is supposed to be about, well, science. Instead, they’ve opened up their pages to politics. Not that Science hasn’t long been bastardized by and riddled with politics. But just like mainstream media was unmasked during this last election as being TOTALLY biased and willing to “shade” the truth (i.e. lie), Science is now unmasked. Barack Hussein Obama submitted an article to the journal about global warming, as an exercise in mass propaganda, to try and create the meme that he actually achieved great things related to energy while in office–i.e., his “legacy.” The opposite is true. In the Science article (below) Obama alludes to the rise of fracking as lowering carbon emissions, but he can’t even bring himself to actually refer to fracking or hydraulic fracturing in the article itself. That would tick off his radical base. The entire article is about global warming and how mankind is causing it–pure rubbish and non-science. But there you go. Our point is that it is now only too obvious that Science is to the scientific world what the National Enquirer is to the “news” world…
January 20th, when Donald Trump is inaugurated and decomposing swamps like the EPA get drained, can’t happen soon enough. However, before that date, the Obamadroids are doing everything they can to get their last digs in. One of them is the rogue, out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency, which will soon be swept clean by Scott Pruitt (delicious justice if ever there were some). We’ve written about the sleazy practice of “sue and settle” in the past–a practice whereby government agencies like the EPA get their friends in the radical environmental movement to sue them, then they quickly settle the case and say “See, we HAVE to do this because the court is making us do it.” Scott Pruitt knows all about that practice and it will stop on Jan. 20. But until then, the EPA continues to engage in it. The latest case they’ve just settled was brought by the odious National Resources Defense Council, Earthworks and a mishmash of other radical groups in May 2016 regarding an attempt to ban injection wells and stop landfills from accepting drill cuttings (see 
In January 2015 a gang of nine far-left anti-drilling “environmental” organizations sued the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claiming the agency doesn’t require the oil and gas industry to spend big bucks to fill out reams of paperwork to prove it’s not polluting Precious Mother Earth with nasty chemicals (see 
As MDN reported last week, area residents packed a small meeting hall in Buckingham County, VA for a five-hour marathon session to express their concerns about building a new compressor station in the county for the upcoming Atlantic Coast Pipeline (see 
Several townships in the Philadelphia orbit appear to be colluding with each other and with the Philadelphia-based Clean Air Council in passing nearly identical resolutions opposing the Mariner East 2 natural gas liquids pipeline. Eight townships or boroughs along or “close to” (meaning not along) the route in Delaware and Chester counties have published resolutions or proclamations badmouthing the project. The municipalities include: Edgmont, West Goshen, Thornbury, Middletown, Westtown, Rose Valley, Swarthmore and Media. Some of the self-incriminating evidence for collusion comes from an admission by one of them: “The community statements are similar to each other because of consultation between their leaders.” And this, from the odious Clean Air Council: “Alex Bomstein, a lawyer with the environmental group Clean Air Council, said that while there are other local campaign such as those in Lebanon and Huntingdon Counties, the efforts in Delaware and Chester Counties are more ‘developed’ in the Philadelphia suburbs. ‘There are more people organizing than elsewhere,’ he said, probably because of a greater population density closer to Philadelphia.” Why would the StateImpact Pennsylvania propagandist quote the CAC in the same article as the colluding towns, unless they were somehow tied together?…
Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Exterran Corporation (with 5,400 employees) specializes in natural gas compression production equipment and processing facilities. They design, build and operate compressor stations and natural gas processing plants. In 2012 MDN reported on a contract Exterran won to build three natural gas processing plants in West Virginia (see 