State Board Approves LNG Liquefaction Plant in Central Massachusetts
In November 2018 MDN told you that Northeast Energy Center, backed by Liberty Energy and NorthStar Industries, is proposing to build an LNG liquefaction plant in central Massachusetts (see LNG Liquefaction Plant May be Coming to Central Massachusetts). The plan is to connect to the Tennessee Gas Pipeline and chill natural gas into LNG for delivery to businesses and organizations like hospitals that are not connected to a natgas pipeline but want to use this cheaper, cleaner-burning fuel source. Good news: On Sept. 20, the Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board tentatively approved plans for the facility. A final approval may come next week.
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Our federal government is out of control under the doddering Joe Biden and those who pull his strings. Earlier this month Biden directed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to impose a mandate on all employers with 100 or more workers that forces employers to either ensure workers are vaccinated against COVID-19, or tested weekly. This kind of government coercion is not acceptable. It’s having a big impact on the oil and gas industry where vaccination rates are lower than the general population.
Imagine Hershey Park getting fined for smelling like a Hershey’s chocolate bar. Or Starbucks getting fined because the businesses next door can smell the coffee. The Shell cracker plant is getting fined for smelling like…maple syrup? Last week residents in several Beaver County, PA municipalities neighboring the Shell ethane cracker complex reported smelling something like a strong whiff of maple syrup. Shell immediately hired a third-party investigator and believes they now know what caused the smell.
In August the Virginia Dept. of Environmental Quality (DEQ) issued a draft Section 401 of the federal Clean Water Act permit that would approve plans to let the 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) finish its work in the state (see 
Ohio’s House Bill (HB) 6 law granted billions (plural) of dollars to FirstEnergy in an attempt to prop up the company’s economically failing nuclear power plants. FirstEnergy bribed state legislators to pass, and keep passed, HB 6 by paying out $61 million to a small group of insiders, including the now-former Speaker of the House (see 
What will happen to the United States if it embarks on sleepy Joe Biden’s “vision” for dumping fossil fuels via regulation and over taxation and instead turns to so-called renewable sources of energy, all in a bid to keep Mom Earth from supposedly toasting? We know what will happen. It’s already happening in the United Kingdom. We have a perfect preview of what will hit us if we adopt the same policies the UK and Europe have adopted: electricity prices out of sight, shortages of natural gas, blackouts and brownouts, high unemployment, and an economy in the crapper.
Lest you think we’ve been overstating the case that Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf wants to end the use of natural gas-fired electric power plants as evidenced by his actions in forcing the state to join the draconian Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) carbon tax scheme, Wolf’s latest so-called climate plan will remove all doubt for you. Yesterday Wolf and his obsequious Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary Pat McDonnell released a 278-page “climate” plan that, among other things, essentially bans natural gas-fired power plants.
Five Big Green groups (some of them funded by foreign governments) led by one of the worst–the Sierra Club–are lobbying the Pennsylvania Environmental Quality Board (EQB) to force PA’s oil and gas drillers to prepay the full amount to decommission wells they drill today and likely won’t be played out for at least 30, maybe as much as 50 years from now. It’s yet another attempt to make drilling for natural gas and oil in the Keystone State so onerous, so expensive, drillers will give up.
If this doesn’t prove that the environmental left isn’t really interested in the environment, but instead only in their leftist (Communistic) policies, nothing will prove it to you. A radical faction of Physicians for Social Responsibility calling itself “Concerned Health Professionals of Pennsylvania” (a false statement if ever there was one) is actively, aggressively trying to end the ability of Pennsylvania’s fracking companies to recycle wastewater (brine) that comes from naturally-occurring water deep in the ground. They figure if they can stop fracking’s green recycling program, maybe they can shut down fracking period. Sick.
The leftist Democrats in Congress (and The White House) are not content to use a single barrel shotgun in its attempt to murder natural gas use in the U.S. They’ve brought out the double barrel shotgun. The federal government is proposing, under the Biden EPA, sweeping new methane emission regulations. The regulations are far worse than anything even in the Obamadroid era. That’s barrel number one. At the same time, the Dems intend to slap an insanely high new tax on methane in their so-called budget reconciliation bill. That’s the second barrel.
A new report from the Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office (IFO) shows Pennsylvania sent more than 79 million megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity to other states in 2020–by far the biggest electricity exporter in the country. And it’s mostly thanks to cheap, abundant, clean-burning natural gas. PA’s position as the number one electric exporter is now threatened by its recalcitrant Governor, Tom Wolf, who insists on forcing the state to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a $2.36 billion carbon tax over the next 10 years aimed at shutting down coal and gas-fired power plants. Is Wolf certifiably insane?
We don’t often use material from the known fake news source called the New York Times, but here we are using a second article from the NYT in one day! The article (below) does its best to shred the reputation and credibility of Joe Manchin, senior U.S. Senator from West Virginia. We have to confess we’re a bit wary of Manchin given his tendency to cave under pressure and vote with the Democrat Party line. But Manchin is all that currently stands in the way of Joe Biden and the Democrat Party’s plan to eliminate natural gas (and coal), phasing both out as energy sources to produce electricity, part of the $3.5 trillion so-called budget reconciliation bill.
Here we go again. Although we understand self-interest and wanting to protect one’s profit margin, we continue to be distressed that some of the biggest chemical companies in the world (meaning in the U.S.) are actively trying to block LNG exports. Why? They want the natural gas they buy (in very large quantities) to be as cheap as possible. In April 2017, Big Chemical–companies like Dow Corning, BASF, Eastman Chemical and others–via their trade association Industrial Energy Consumers of America (IECA), launched an effort to try and persuade Energy Secretary Rick Perry and the Trump Administration to create barriers to exports of natural gas (see