Economic Impact | Energy Services | Industrywide Issues | Jobs | Luzerne County | Pennsylvania | Pipelines | Schuylkill County | Williams
Leidy South Compressors Generate $100M Economic Impact, 680 Jobs
Did you know that building just two new compressor stations in Pennsylvania will bring the state an extra $100 million in economic activity and support 680 direct, indirect and induced jobs? We sure didn’t! Last week Williams filed a newly published study with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on the economic impact of their proposed Leidy South Expansion Project (full study embedded below). The study makes an irrefutable case for building the new compressor stations in Luzerne and Schuylkill counties.
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As MDN previously reported, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit bought the lies of colluding Big Green groups and decided to put a hold on a permit issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) that allows the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) to build through areas with so-called endangered and threatened species (see 
In April, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals slapped down both New York and North Carolina regulators who tried to block three important Williams pipeline projects, all related to the mighty Transco Pipeline (see 
New York City’s CBS affiliate WLNY Channel 2 recently got a sit-down interview with National Grid President John Bruckner to discuss the company’s moratorium on new gas hook-ups, to grill Bruckner on whether or not there really is a gas shortage in the region. Bruckner handled the adversarial interview well, telling the reporter that yes, there really is a shortage. Currently there is a shortage between supply and demand–to the tune of 10,000 homes. Bruckner said if there’s a serious cold snap this winter, Long Island and parts of NYC served by National Grid will experience a service outage–a natural gas blackout, if you will. It’s a scary prospect.
Mountaineer Gas it close to completing Phase One of its Eastern Panhandle Expansion project in West Virginia, a 22.5-mile, 10-inch-diameter steel pipeline from Morgan County to Berkeley County. The project is designed to deliver Marcellus/Utica natural gas via local distribution channels to a new $150 million industrial facility in Berkeley County, WV, and to provide “a redundant supply” of gas to some 6,000 local businesses and residents in the Tri-State area. The system is supposed to be fed by a short 3.5-mile pipeline from Columbia Gas running under the Potomac River from Maryland into WV.
For residents who want to build a new home or business in either Northampton or Easthampton (Hampshire County), Massachusetts, and connect to natural gas supplies–you can forget about it. Columbia Gas of Massachusetts has announced that a moratorium on new natural gas customers in those two municipalities, in place since 2015, will become permanent. Citing “cost impacts and benefits” to customers, Columbia’s president says the company will no longer build what it called the “alternate backfeed” pipeline project–a 6-mile pipe that would have run between Agawam and Holyoke to supply Northampton and Easthampton.
In August, Enterprise Products Partners, the builder and operator of the Appalachia-to-Texas Express (ATEX) ethane pipeline, launched an open season to gauge interest in expanding the capacity along the 1,192-mile pipeline (see 
Sounding like North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Friday “ordered” National Grid to connect 1,157 new natural gas customers previously denied service because National Grid won’t have enough natural gas on the coldest days in winter to service everyone. New York has descended into a police state, with our Dear Leader ordering around companies in contravention of established law. Yet not a peep from mainstream news organizations about Cuomo’s excessive abuse of power.
We’ve seen this movie before. The radical fringe leftists from the Sierra Club (disgusting organization) convinced the clown judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (i.e. Circus) to block construction of Dominion Energy’s 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) pipeline by getting the court to toss U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permits that allow the project to kill a couple of bats along a few miles of the project (see 
How would you like to find out that your billion dollar pipeline project has just been denied another permit–by getting a tweet? That’s what happened to PennEast Pipeline on Friday. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy tweeted that NJ’s Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) is, once again, denying a federal Clean Water Act Section 401 stream crossing permit for the project. The putz delivered the news to PennEast via a tweet–can you believe that? The NJ DEP is rejecting the permit not for any scientific reasons, which is what the law stipulates, but because of politics.
What happens when two of three elected town supervisors either have a lease with a pipeline company, or have close family members who have leases with the pipeline company, and they must vote to approve a new power plant project that would use shale gas from that pipeline to power it? It’s called a conflict of interest, and we’re about to find out the answer to that question in Robinson Township (Washington County), PA.
National Grid, the electric and natural gas utility company that serves part of New York City and all of Long Island, has been the target of a smear campaign by New York Gov. Cuomo, who ordered his Dept. of Environment Conservation (DEC) to reject the Williams Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline project in May (see 