FERC Won’t Change Pipeline Approval Policy Until 5 Members Vote
On Monday Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Chairman Neil Chatterjee addressed the EnVision Forum at the University of Kentucky. Among his comments: FERC won’t reconsider how it approves pipelines, the framework it uses, until there are a full five members of the Commission (currently there are three). President Trump recently nominated a fourth person as commissioner, James Danly (see Trump Selects FERC Attorney James Danly as New Commissioner). Don’t look for a full quorum to be available any time soon. The last time FERC updated its pipeline approval framework was 20 years ago–in 1999.
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In April President Trump issued an Executive Order (EO) directing the Secretary of Transportation to write a new rule allowing specially constructed tanker cars for railroads (DOT-113 tank cars) to ship LNG, i.e., liquefied natural gas (see 
A recent editorial written by the editors of the Wall Street Journal begins with this superb sentence: “New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has a habit of bullying others to cover for and fix his policy blunders.” It goes on to rip Cuomo to shreds for his bullying of National Grid, forcing the company to add new natural gas customers against its wishes because come wintertime, they may not have enough gas to service all customers in the Greater New York City/Long Island region. Why a moratorium on new customers? Because Cuomo denied National Grid a pipeline to supply the gas they need–the Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline.
In April 2018 Williams filed a request with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to expand capacity along the mighty Transco Pipeline to increase the amount of gas the pipeline can flow to the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern U.S by 296,375 dekatherms (296 million cubic feet) per day (see 
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) has drafted up new “technical guidance” on “radioactivity monitoring at solid waste processing and disposal facilities” specifically targeted at the shale industry. Translation: new regulations for how dumps (and drillers) monitor and report on radioactivity levels from incoming loads of drill cuttings. The DEP has posted their proposed new guidance document for public comment, after which they will adopt the new regs.
If this doesn’t beat all. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo refused to allow a new pipeline to get built, so National Grid, the gas utility for all of Long Island and part of New York City, had to ban new customer hook-ups. Cuomo blamed National Grid and got the state Public Service Commission (PSC) to issue an edict forcing National Grid to add more than 1,000 new customers (see 
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 
Allegheny County, PA (Pittsburgh and surrounding suburbs) is seriously considering a new law that would require landowners to report, via a public registry, land they have leased oil and gas drilling. Specifically land leased for shale wells. The law would require all sorts of private information to be divulged, publicly, including what kind of drilling/fracking will theoretically take place. And what if a landowner doesn’t “register” with the authorities? Here come the fines. The only reason we can divine for such a law is to shame landowners (lease-shaming), to prompt neighbors to hassle them for leasing their land. Or perhaps to alert Big Green groups so they can use paid protesters (as they so often do) to show up and protest in front of someone’s leased property. What has our society become?
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.
Here we go again. Not only does Boston and New England now depend on Russian LNG, so too does U.S. territory Puerto Rico (PR)–thanks to a century-old law that prevents the U.S. from shipping LNG to our own states and territories! It’s bizarre and must stop. The closest LNG export facility to PR is Kinder Morgan’s Elba Island, Georgia facility, which recently came online (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.
Last year the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued administrative orders requiring three oil and gas companies–Alliance Petroleum Corporation (a subsidiary of Diversified Gas & Oil), XTO Energy, and CNX Resources–to plug 1,058 abandoned oil and gas wells across Pennsylvania (see 