Hillary Clinton’s War on Fracking
Since we’re taking Donald Trump to task over his wrong-headed thinking on local frack bans, we’d like to be an equal opportunity basher. Hillary Clinton’s position on fracking is far worse than The Donald’s position. If Hill has her way, she’ll end the practice. Oh, not with an Executive Order banning fracking, as Crazy Bernie promised he would do if he got elected. No, Hill is promising to enact new regulations (either via Congress or via Executive Orders) so strict, that “By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place.” Her words. Although Hillary is a known and proven liar, we happen to believe those words coming from her mouth. First up for Hill, “fix” the so-called “Halliburton loophole.” In 2005 Congress passed new environmental standards for the Safe Drinking Water Act (managed by the out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency) and chose not to include the oil and gas industry in those standards because the EPA has no right to regulate the oil & gas industry–only the states can regulate the o&g industry under the U.S. Constitution. The proper recognition of not expanding the EPA’s authority (illegally) somehow has been twisted into a “loophole” for the industry, and Halliburton’s name was applied to the loophole in an attempt to smear then-Vice President Dick Cheney, who was previously the CEO of Halliburton. Hillary has resurrected the same old Democrat lie and smear campaign from years gone by. She says if she becomes Prez (God forbid), she’ll jam the EPA right up the o&g industry’s….operations….as far as she can…
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Last week MDN highlighted a survey from Evercore ISI looking at attitudes and behaviors of displaced workers in the oil and gas industry (see 
Just prior to going on trial for committing felonies while in office, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane (Democrat) needed something, ANYTHING, to distract the press from focusing on her own crimes. Since she took office in January 2013, Kane has targeted the Marcellus industry. One of the first high profile cases she manufactured (out of nothing) was to accuse XTO Energy of committing a crime in an accidental spill of a few thousand gallons of frack wastewater–an accident in Lycoming County, PA that happened years before she took office and didn’t have any long-term effects (see 
LNG (liquefied natural gas) is a big deal and getting bigger–you know that if you’ve read MDN for any length of time. As the U.S. begins to shift into producing more natural gas than it can use here at home, exporting that gas, via LNG, is an important market–for the Marcellus, Utica and beyond.
MDN felt that the big news today was word from Spectra Energy that their Access Northeast pipeline project is making excellent progress (see Spectra Energy 2Q16 – Access Northeast “Advancing Toward Execution”). However, a bit of news coming from Spectra disclosed on yesterday’s earnings call comes in at a close second. You may recall there was an explosion and fire in Spectra Energy’s Texas Eastern Transmission’s “Delmont Line 27” pipeline in May (see 
Score an important victory against the forces of darkness. The radical leftist PA-based group Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) does its best to trick townships into passing illegal bans on fracking and injection wells. In 2013 the CELDF fooled Highland Township in Elk County, PA into passing a ban on wastewater injection wells. They also tricked Grant Township in Indiana County, PA to do the same thing. Both towns are in court defending their illegal actions. One of the idiotic legal tactics used by the CELDF in both cases is to claim that an ecosystem is a “person” under the law–a person who can file to join the town’s lawsuit in an effort to protect itself (see 
In May the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) once again far overstepped its charter by seizing power that doesn’t belong to it. They issued new methane rules in a back-door way to try and regulate the oil and gas industry (see 
On Tuesday MDN brought you what we thought was the very first Annual Oil and Gas Annual Report from the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (see 
MDN spotted what we thought was an interesting article on the Seeking Alpha investors website about the existing pipeline bottleneck in Northeastern PA and what can be done about getting all of that gas to market. Pipeline delays out of NEPA, including the delayed Constitution Pipeline and projects currently underway but taking a long time, like the Atlantic Sunrise, are forcing producers like Cabot Oil & Gas, Southwestern Energy and Chesapeake Energy to look for other ways to move their abundant supplies of natgas out of the region. Eastbound routes out of NEPA are full, but westbound routes *may* be a possible solution–at least in the short-to-medium term. National Fuel Gas’s pipeline system has expanded recently to allow more gas to flow west. NFG has additional projects in the coming years to build on that capacity. Is it time to Go West, Young Molecule?…
We found this story amusing. A group of 40 anti-fossil fuel nutters met at the Towamensing Township fire hall Tuesday night to “hone their arguments and strategies on how to derail or at least delay construction” of the $1.2 billion PennEast Pipeline. Why is that amusing? Because if the media is reporting there were 40 there, that means there were really 20-25. And when you read the story, you get the distinct impression that a very small group of hardened anti-fossil fuelers move these meetings around–it’s the same small group–and that their movement to stop PennEast is dying. Rapidly. Here’s the latest evidence…
We will confess it up front: We voted for Donald Trump in the primary. We think he stands the best chance of defeating Hillary Clinton. Clinton would, in our opinion, be very bad for the oil and gas industry (as well as bad for the country in general). To each his own, right? We will not extensively cover the election–that’s already being done everywhere else. Most everyone has a strong opinion one way or the other. Trump has given some bang-up speeches supporting the fossil fuel industry (see 
One of NGI’s ace reporters, Carolyn Davis, got her hands on a new report/survey conducted by Evercore ISI that looks at attitudes and behaviors of displaced workers in the oil and gas industry. The results are quite interesting. You may recall that something like 300,000+ o&g workers were laid off over the past several years. Many of them worked for oilfield services companies (OFS), like Halliburton, Baker Hughes and Schlumberger. In fact, our back-of-the-envelope tally says the vast majority of those layoffs came from just a handful of companies, namely those three. The Evercore survey found that many (most?) workers are not returning to the oil and gas industry, now that hiring has begun again. And that’s a problem. It means that there aren’t enough bodies to do the work. It seems the laid-off workers didn’t appreciate getting canned, tossed overboard like a piece of trash at the first sign of trouble–and many of them have gotten jobs in other industries. Who can blame them?! Here’s a few highlights from the survey…