Dominion Buys 26% of Iroquois Gas Transmission Pipeline
Dominion has just purchased themselves a bigger seat at the Marcellus/Utica midstream (pipeline) table with the purchase of 26% of the Iroquois Gas Transmission System. The Iroquois, you may recall, is one of two pipelines that will connect to the Constitution Pipeline to be built by Williams starting later this year. The Constitution will flow 650 million cubic feet (MMcf) per day of Marcellus Shale gas mostly from Cabot Oil & Gas wells in Susquehanna County, PA. The 125-mile Constitution will run from PA into New York and connect with the Iroquois (and the Tennessee Gas Pipeline) in Schoharie County, NY. The Iroquois is a 416-mile interstate natural gas pipeline running from the U.S.-Canadian border at Waddington, NY, through NY and western Connecticut to its terminus in Commack, NY, and from Huntington to the Bronx, NY. The Iroquois supplies clean-burning natural gas to local distribution companies (LDCs) an electric power generators in New England and the greater New York City area. Increasingly the Iroquois is flowing Marcellus Shale gas. It is that pipeline that Dominion has just purchased a major piece of…
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Let’s talk about optics and the strategies employed by fossil fuel haters. We’ll leave aside our standard argument that people who hate fossil fuels, like natural gas, are wildly hypocritical as their very existence is a direct result of the benefits of fossil fuels. Today we focus on two men who hit life’s lottery–one (younger) became a pediatrician, the other (older) a physics professor. Last week the two chained themselves to the entrance of Spectra Energy’s Burrillville, Rhode Island compressor station to call attention to Spectra’s Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) project to beef up the compressor station and add pipelines to bring more cheap, abundant, clean-burning Marcellus Shale natural gas to gas-starved Rhode Island and other New England states. The two protesters belong to a fossil fuel hate group called FANG–Fighting Against Natural Gas. Using PVC pipe, chicken wire and (yes) tar, they intertwined their arms to make it extremely difficult to un-knot them. The police had to cut away a section of the fence and cart the fence and the two protesters to the hospital where doctors and nurses had to waste time untangling the mess. The optics, of course, is that FANG wants you to hear about a doctor and a physics professor (supposedly smart people) who put themselves in harm’s way to protest something–so the something must be evil and rotten since these two virtuous “high value” (and smarter than the rest of us) members of society are sounding the alarm. We think you should focus on different optics–the logo/mascot FANG uses on their website (pictured here, taken from their website). A wolf bearing its fangs indicates extreme danger–and a willingness to go to extremes to cause property, and perhaps even bodily, damage. Homeland Security should take note…
Ever hear the phrase, “diggin’ deep”? That’s what anti-drillers are doing in New Hampshire with their opposition to a pipeline slated to come through their area in Hillsborough County. As plans for Kinder Morgan’s $6 billion Northeast Energy Direct (NED) pipeline project that will stretch from Pennsylvania through New York into Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and back into Massachusetts near Boston progress, more and more articles appear in newspapers, like the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, attempting to convince people the pipeline is from Satan himself. In fact, according to the latest article, NED may just be from Satan! The Ledger-Transcript claims the pipeline, if it follows the same route as already-built high voltage electric lines, would cut through a hay field that (151 years ago) used to be a potato field and is the site of a miracle of importance to Seventh-Day Adventists…