Industrywide Issues

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    Wrath of Kann: Lancaster Anti-Driller Guilty of Disorderly Conduct

    Back in April MDN told you about a loud mouthed anti-drilling protester in Lancaster County, PA who was arrested and removed from a public meeting for disorderly conduct. That is, she wouldn’t shut her mouth. So the officials running the meeting removed her (see Wrath of Kann: Lancaster Anti-Driller Arrested/Ejected from Mtg). The meeting was an educational forum about home rule and what role the town can and should play when it comes to regulating things like pipelines. Audience members were permitted to ask questions only, but that didn’t sit well with a local anti-driller who refused to ask questions and instead pontificated. The audience was clearly agitated with her (watch the video below) so police present at the meeting arrested and removed her. A judge has found her guilty as charged…
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    Minor Speed Bumps for PennEast Pipeline in NJ

    New Jersey residents who are somewhat ignorant, being stoked with fear by Big Green groups like the NJ chapter of the Sierra Club and THE Delaware Riverkeeper, are not allowing access to surveyors of the PennEast Pipeline. Because of it, the NJ Dept. of Environmental Protection refuses to issue permits for the pipeline stating they don’t have enough information to make a determination–because PennEast can’t provide it because irrational residents are not allowing them on their property because their fears are being fed by Big Green/Sierra Clubbers/Riverkeeper. So anti-fossil fuelers are claiming victory and believe they have vanquished the evil pipleine. PennEast is saying (yawn) knock yourselves out. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) will make the decision anyway and your silly little protests will ultimately mean nothing…
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    PA’s CELDF Unmasked as Troublemakers in Ohio Utica Shale

    Energy in Depth is out with a dynamite expose that rips the face off the Pennsylvania-based anti-drilling organization behind much of the anti-drilling mischief happening in Ohio. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) seeks to ban fracking and anything to do with it, like pipelines, in every community with a sympathetic (and undiscerning) ear. CELDF founder, Thomas Linzey, is a real piece of work. EID’s expose shines the light on the unapologetic Linzey and his outrageous assertions–like instead of humans having rights he thinks nature should have rights. In fact, the potty-mouthed Linzey says, on camera (watch the video) that there should be a ballot initiative that bans all finance companies in New York City from funding new projects “that exasperate climate change.” Talk about a Cuckoo Bird. The worst part is Linzey’s arrogance and smugness–he really believes this stuff, and he believes he’s better (and smarter) than you and me. He’s on a mission to tear apart this country and our Constitution from the inside out to further his radical environmental agenda. Here, read and listen for yourself…
    Read More “PA’s CELDF Unmasked as Troublemakers in Ohio Utica Shale”

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    CONSOL’s #1 Stockholder Says Spin Off CNX Gas…or Sell It

    told you soThe plot thickens. Last week MDN was the first, and until now the only, source reporting on rumors that CONSOL Energy may sell it’s CNX Gas division (see Rumors Circulate that CONSOL May Sell Itself to Noble Energy). We were roundly criticized (privately) for our speculation and reportage of gossip heard round the water cooler–even though we made it clear it’s just rumor and speculation. We told you on Monday that rumors continue to persist (see CONSOL Energy/Noble Energy Rumors Continue to Swirl). Indeed, the rumors of a CNX sale DO continue to persist–but now it’s not just some obscure industry blog like MDN doing the speculating. Now it’s none other than CONSOL Energy’s #1 investor–corporate raider Mason Hawkins–the guy who owns 21% of CONSOL’s stock. Yes, the same Mason Hawkins who conspired with villainous corporate raider Carl Icahn to oust Aubrey McClendon from Chesapeake Energy and has since caused Chessy to sell off many of its assets. According to an SEC filing on July 20, Hawkins is actively talking to CONSOL and to potential buyers of the CNX Gas division. Hawkins is telling CONSOL to either spin off CNX Gas into its own company–or sell it…
    Read More “CONSOL’s #1 Stockholder Says Spin Off CNX Gas…or Sell It”

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    Mickey Mouse Loves Marcellus Shale Gas – More Gas Heading to FL

    Sit tight Florida: Marcellus Shale gas is on the way! That’s the message from Genscape and Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. When will Marcellus gas make its way to Florida? Actually, it already is. In fact, Mickey Mouse (i.e. Disney World) is already benefiting from cheap, abundant, clean-burning Marcellus Shale gas. But there’s plenty more on the way beginning later this year when both Kinder Morgan’s Tennessee Gas Pipeline system and Spectra Energy’s Ohio Pipeline Energy Network are completed and begin sending gas to the Sunshine State…
    Read More “Mickey Mouse Loves Marcellus Shale Gas – More Gas Heading to FL”

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    $800M Utica Gas-Fired Electric Plant Breaks Ground in Carroll Cnty

    Exactly two years ago this month MDN brought you news that Carroll County Energy in Carroll County, OH–a subsidiary of Advanced Power Services–would spend $800 million to build a new 700-megawatt natural gas electric generating plant in the county to be fed by Utica Shale gas (see New NatGas Powered Electric Plant Coming to Carroll County, OH). It took a while, but yesterday officials held the official ground-breaking ceremony for the plant. Over the next 30 months Advance will create some 700 “temporary” jobs to build the plant–and when it goes live, the plant will employ 25-30 permanent full-time employees…
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    Report Says New England Pipelines Not Cost Effective for Maine

    A disappointing report was recently delivered to the Maine Public Utility Commission (PUC) that may result in Maine sticking its head in the proverbial sand along its lovely coastline and miss out on cheap, abundant, clean-burning natural gas. In an effort to lower electric power prices, in 2013 the Maine Legislature authorized the PUC to spend up to $75 million a year to buy up to 200 million cubic feet per day of natural gas through an “energy cost reduction contract” (ECRC) that would be paid for by electric ratepayers if it is cost effective. Three companies provided proposals to the PUC: Spectra Energy, Tennessee Gas Pipeline and Portland Natural Gas Transmission System. The PUC hired the Boston-based London Economics International (LEI) to evaluate the proposals and the report is in (full redacted copy below). LEI says none of the three proposals provide enough cost savings to Maine consumers to make them worthwhile…
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    White Paper Shines Light on Marcellus/Utica NGL Supply Chain

    One of the great stories about shale drilling in the Marcellus/Utica that often gets overlooked is the story of NGLs–or natural gas liquids. NGLs include “other” hydrocarbons that come out of the borehole–like ethane, pentane, butane, isobutane and propane. Ethane is typically the most voluminous NGL coming out of the ground and is the chemical that feeds giant cracker plants that turn it into ethylene–the raw feedstock used to make plastics and anti-freeze. The NGL market has been transformed, seemingly overnight, by the abundance of NGLs in the Marcellus/Utica region–now the #1 NGL producing region in the country. Tracking how much natural gas and NGLs flows through pipelines is a service offered by Genscape–a great company with great people. They use innovative technologies and techniques to figure out how much gas and/or liquids are flowing in a pipeline–including infrared cameras! They also use cameras mounted near facilities to snap pictures of tanker trucks exiting a facility. All in an effort to estimate how much of a given product is moving through the system. It’s really cool stuff. If you want to know who’s processing and flowing how much natural gas, NGLs or other types of power (even including electric power), Genscape is the company to use. So when we spotted a new white paper from Genscape titled “Disruptions & Vulnerabilities Impacting the Evolving Marcellus/Utica NGL Supply Chain,” we knew we had to read it. The white paper highlights the impacts of NGL expansion in the northeast, vulnerabilities to the NGL supply chain, infrastructure trends, and expectations for pricing…
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    GE/Statoil Announce Winners of Sand-Alternatives Contest

    Quick–what two things do you need in abundance in order to horizontally drill and frack a well? Yep–water and sand. The two together make up 99.5% of what goes down the borehole to drill and frack a shale well. Water is used to fracture or break open the rock and deliver the sand, which is called a proppant because some of it stays behind and “props open” the fractures in the rock, allowing gas and oil to escape into the borehole. The vast majority of truck trips to a well pad are to deliver water and sand. GE and Norwegian giant Statoil have teamed up to run an “Open Invitation Challenge” which is a contest for technology innovators to propose alternatives to water and sand, to reduce the amount of each and therefore reduce truck trips to and from well pads. The results are in for the sand challenge and five winners will each take home a check for $25,000. The winners have some fascinating technologies and if they meet certain other criteria are eligible for more money to develop and commercialize their technologies. And what are some of these interesting bits of tech? How about a polymer that swells to 10 times its initial size when liquid is added. Or a ceramic proppant that’s shapped in the form of an X acting like a tiny steel girder to keep rock fractures propped open. This is truly creative and potentially industry changing stuff…
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    PA Landowners Sue XTO Energy for Shorting Them on Royalties

    cha chingTwo Butler County, PA landowners with a combined 245.7 acres of land leased to XTO Energy have sued XTO claiming that XTO is breaking the lease agreement by paying royalties below 1/8 of what XTO receives in revenue for the gas. So far we’ve heard about Chesapeake Energy being the focus of these types of lawsuits for their shenanigans of inflating post-production costs from the pipeline company and then receiving a “kick back” of investments by the same pipeline company (see Chesapeake Shafting Landowners out of Royalties Mess Gets Messier). Although we don’t believe the XTO lawsuit claims the exact same thing, what it does claim is that the lease signed with the landowners does not include language that would allow XTO to deduct certain charges that they are now deducting. That’s the claim. Of course you need lawyers to sue and the lawyers in this case aren’t content with representing just two landowners. They want to turn this into a massive class action and represent hundreds of landowners (cha ching!)…
    Read More “PA Landowners Sue XTO Energy for Shorting Them on Royalties”

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    2nd Canadian LNG Plant Gets U.S. Approval to Export Marcellus Gas

    In May MDN told you that one of four proposed Canadian LNG (liquefied natural gas) export facilities that wants to export American shale gas received a green light from the U.S. Dept. of Energy to export our shale gas (see Canadian LNG Project to Export Marcellus Gas Gets DOE Approval). Good news. A second Canadian LNG export facility, Bear Head LNG in Nova Scotia, has just received the DOE’s official approval to export American shale gas. The shale gas they will export, if the plant gets built (still a big “if”), for both of the approved plants, would be Marcellus and Utica Shale natural gas. There are still many hurdles, including: (1) the Maritimes & Northeast pipeline has to get FERC permission to reverse its flow; (2) the gas has to get to the Maritimes & Northeast pipeline in the first place via new pipelines from either Kinder Morgan or Spectra Energy; and (3) the price of oil has to rise to make the whole thing economical, since LNG is so closely tied to the price of oil. Here’s the announcement from Bear Head LNG…
    Read More “2nd Canadian LNG Plant Gets U.S. Approval to Export Marcellus Gas”

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    Noble Energy Completes Buyout of Rosetta Resources

    Noble Energy, the company that with a 50/50 joint venture with CONSOL Energy in some 663,350 acres of Marcellus and Utica Shale leases in the northeast and rumored to be interested in either taking over all of the acreage (becoming the company of record on the acreage and doing the drilling on that acreage) or possibly buying the gas division of CONSOL Energy, one of America’s oldest and biggest coal companies, just closed on buying out Rosetta Resources Inc. Noble purchased Rosetta for its Eagle Ford and Permian Basin acreage–over 100,000 acres total (located in Texas). Here’s the details of that purchase…
    Read More “Noble Energy Completes Buyout of Rosetta Resources”

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    Talen Energy Picks Up Gas-Fired Electric Plants – Marcellus in View

    An electric generation company based in Allentown, PA–Talen Energy–has just cut a deal to acquire MACH Gen, LLC, the owner of three natural gas-fired electric generating plants. One of those plants is located in upstate New York and is likely to begin using cheap, abundant, clean-burning natural gas from the gas fields of Susquehanna County, PA once the Constitution Pipeline is built. Another of the three MACH electric generating plants is located in Massachusetts and also likely (in our opinion) to burn Marcellus Shale gas. Below is the announcement from Talen followed by two articles that reference the NY and MA plants as likely candidates to use Marcellus Shale gas…
    Read More “Talen Energy Picks Up Gas-Fired Electric Plants – Marcellus in View”

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    PA Bill Gives Tax Breaks to “Downstream” Natgas Businesses

    Here’s a cool idea: What if Pennsylvania granted 10 years of tax breaks to businesses that use shale gas and create at least 10 new jobs within three years? And what if those tax breaks for businesses were available in PA’s more rural areas–not the big cities? In other words, what if PA created more “downstream” jobs–jobs in manufacturing? Sure sounds like a winner to us. PA State Senator Scott Hutchinson (Republican from Oil City) has introduced Senate Bill (SB) 886 that would do just those things–turning PA into a jobs-creating powerhouse in the downstream sector…
    Read More “PA Bill Gives Tax Breaks to “Downstream” Natgas Businesses”

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    WV Congressman Says Obama Purposely Not Enforcing Pipeline Safety

    Congressman David McKinley, Republican from West Virginia, recently expressed his frustration with the Obama Administration and their lack of action in enforcing the 2011 Pipeline Safety Bill. McKinley said pipelines are safe but because Obama isn’t interested in promoting the image of safe pipelines (because it leads to more natural gas use), the Obama Administration is intentionally dragging its feet as it so often does when it doesn’t want to enforce laws Congress has passed that the lawless Lord B.H.O. disagrees with. McKinley threatens if federal agencies won’t do their job, Congress will force them to do it…
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    Marathon Outlines Strategy for Buying MarkWest in PPT Presentation

    Seemingly out of the blue, last week Marathon Petroleum’s midstream division, MPLX, announced they had reached an agreement with arguably THE premier Marcellus/Utica midstream company, MarkWest Energy, to buy out MarkWest and make it a division of MPLX–essentially a division of Marathon Petroleum (see Midstream Bombshell: MarkWest Sells Itself to Marathon Petroleum). We speculated at the time that MarkWest didn’t want to become a Williams–the target of a hostile takeover by someone they don’t want to own them. So MarkWest went and found a suitable suitor and sold themselves. Marathon has provided a bit more of their thinking about why they think MarkWest will make a great addition to MPLX and how it all works in the organization chart by issuing a useful PowerPoint presentation of “supplemental information.” We have that PowerPoint for you below…
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