New IEA Report: Worldwide Investment in Energy Dropped 8% in 2015
The International Energy Agency (IEA) is a European run and influence group of 29 countries that fervently believe the sky is falling, and that Mom Earth is toasting. Yep, global warmists. According to the IEA, the group is “an autonomous organisation which works to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy for its 29 member countries and beyond. The IEA has four main areas of focus: energy security, economic development, environmental awareness and engagement worldwide.” Er, ah, right. That makes it plain as day. Anyhow, the socialist IEA has no problem charging a king’s ransom for the reports they periodically issue. Last November the IEA issued their annual World Energy Outlook, predicting the world will see $80/barrel oil by 2020 (see IEA World Energy Outlook Predicts $80 Oil by 2020). ***Children! Please stop your laughing! Some people still believe in peak oil theory and it’s not nice to make fun of them!*** Back to center. The IEA has just published another new report–this one the first annual World Energy Investment report. As the authors point out: The “lifeblood” of the global energy system is…investment. That is, money. Without it, new sources of energy don’t appear. The IEA’s report says in 2015 global investment in energy went down 8% over 2014 levels. But for IEA there was good news in the bad news–almost all of the drop was in fossil fuel investment, whereas investments in so-called renewable sources of energy continued to increase last year. So says the IEA…
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Gas-to-liquids (GTL) plants often convert natural gas into methanol. Methanol is one of the most commonly used substances in the chemical industry–used to produce antifreeze, fuels, solvents and many types of plastics. Converting methane (or natural gas) into methanol has been around for a while–but converting it at room temperature, using far less energy, is new. Scientists at KU Leuven and Stanford University have figured out how to do it. And it’s a really big deal…
The Ohio Business Roundtable (BRT) is a partnership of the CEOs of leading Ohio companies that collectively account for more than $1 trillion in annual revenues, $1 trillion in market value and $2.6 trillion in assets. BRT’s members employ 2.6 million men and women, invest hundreds of millions of dollars annually in combined charitable contributions and research and development, and generate billions of dollars in sales for small and medium-sized businesses that are part of the supply chain. When the BRT in Ohio talks, people had better listen. Here’s the latest in what the BRT has to say: The state (i.e. Gov. Kasich) needs “a comprehensive reworking of the state’s energy policies in order to accelerate shale gas development.” No more tiptoeing around. Build those pipelines and build them NOW. That’s the upshot of a new report from the BRT titled, “Improving Ohio Energy Competitiveness” (full copy below). The report is backed up by detailed research from powerhouse consulting company McKinsey and Co. (their research is also embedded below). The BRT’s report points out the importance of the state’s natural gas-fired electric generating plants and says without more pipelines, new power plants won’t get built. The two issues are joined at the hip–vitally important for Ohio’s shale drillers, midstream companies, electric generators and yes Ohio’s electric ratepayers as well. LISTEN UP: Here’s what the BRT had to say…
Last week MDN reported researchers from Ohio State University had discovered a new form of microorganism in fracked Utica Shale wells–something they call “Frackibacter” (we call it Frackenstein). As researchers continue to pour over the research, they’ve hit upon a stunning new revelation. Those little critters may actually INCREASE natural gas output from the well. Now that is exciting news! OSU is on the case, promising to further examine Frackibacter’s origin and “more of its applications”…
Yesterday MDN’s favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), issued our favorite monthly report–the Drilling Productivity Report (DPR). The DPR is the EIA’s best guess, based on expert data crunchers, as to how much each of the U.S.’s seven major shale plays will produce for both oil and natural gas in the coming month. The September marks a new milestone–the EIA has added a new tab of information for Drilled but UnCompleted wells, called DUCs in the business. Beginning with this month’s report, the EIA now includes estimates for how many DUCs there are, by shale play. The ongoing meme for sometime has been that the DUC inventory has been dwindling, with drillers not willing to drill new wells given the low price of oil and gas. To keep things moving (and revenue coming in the door) drillers have taken to completing wells they drilled but never finished, or “completed” as it’s called in the business. Completing a well includes fracking it and hooking it up to production. As DUCs go down, and as new wells are not begun, it portends a coming decrease in supply and therefore a coming rise in prices. That’s what drillers, midstreamers, gas traders and others watch for. So this new section in the monthly DPR will be eagerly watched. So what does the September DPR show for predicted production in the Marcellus and Utica?…
Last week the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) doled out a total of $13 million in grants for twelve multi-year research projects. The aim of the projects is to develop ways to mitigate methane emissions from natural gas pipelines and storage infrastructure, ways that don’t break the bank. Two of the twelve projects will be run in Pittsburgh. PPG Industries, the Gas Technology Institute and RTI International received a combined $876,639 to study remote monitoring of natural gas pipelines. The University of Pittsburgh and Corning together got a whopping $1.2 million to develop an advanced distributed optical fiber technology for natural gas infrastructure monitoring. Here’s the lowdown from the DOE…
Two Democrat-run anti-fossil fuel organizations–the Southern Environmental Law Center and Appalachian Mountain Advocates–pooled their donated money together and went out to find a consulting firm with the veneer of respectability that could be bought off to produce a faux “report” slamming two much-needed pipelines. They found an easy mark in Synapse Energy Economics, headquartered in ultra-liberal Massachusetts. The “report” Synapse produced says neither Dominion’s $5 billion, 594-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline (a natural gas pipeline that will stretch from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina), nor EQT’s $3.5 billion, 301-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (from Wetzel County, WV to the Transco Pipeline in Pittsylvania County, VA) are needed. The sham report, titled “Are the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Mountain Valley Pipeline Necessary?” (full copy below) is getting picked up by lazy (or propagandist) mainstream news organizations and reported as real news. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a joke…
Although there’s less new drilling for oil and gas (at least there’s less if you believe press reports), and although DUCs (drilled but uncompleted wells) are decreasing, overall production in the lower 48 states is actually increasing. IHS Markit says natgas production in August increased month over month for the second month in a row–something that hasn’t happened in a year. Markit says the main reason is an increase in production in the northeast–specifically an increase in production in the Utica Shale. However, there were also increases in other plays. Here’s the full update…
Using natural gas may literally save your life. Researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) recently conducted research using the country of Turkey because that country has made a big shift over the past couple of decades, moving away from other forms of energy and to natural gas. The researchers looked at mortality rates for adults and the elderly and found that mortality rates for both groups dropped, dramatically, over that period. Why? How? Good questions. Because the air is now cleaner thanks to an increase in natgas use, there has been a decrease in pollution linked and a correlating decrease in lung and heart disease deaths among adults and the elderly. It’s in the report. Of course people living longer because of natural gas isn’t good news for anti-fossil fuel nutters…
In the past we’ve been pretty critical of the Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office (IFO). It claims to provide revenue projections for use in the state budget process along with “impartial and timely analysis of fiscal, economic and budgetary issues to assist Commonwealth residents and the General Assembly in their evaluation of policy decisions.” It’s been our observation the IFO is populated with partisan Democrats. However, we have to acknowledge lately their analysis work, at least with regard to the Marcellus industry, has been pretty accurate (see 
The Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) has just issued production numbers for the second quarter of 2016. Compared with second quarter 2015, production numbers in 2Q16 were a mixed bag. Oil production in 2Q16 dropped by 19%–that’s the bad news. But natural gas production from shale is up 51% year over year–that’s the good news. CONSOL Energy’s CNX Gas division had the #1 producing gas well in Monroe County, the Brewster well, producing 1.6 billion cubic feet of natgas during 2Q16. Eclipse Resources had the #1 producing oil well in Guernsey County, the monster Purple Hayes, which produced an astonishing 71,072 barrels of oil in 2Q16. Below we have the ODNR’s high level overview of the numbers, along with MDN’s own exclusive analysis showing: the top 25 producing gas wells, the top 25 producing oil wells, and then the top 25 gas and oil wells as ranked by average production per day. There is a difference!…
S&P Global Market Intelligence recently conducted research on 10 of the largest Marcellus/Utica drillers to discover which have “hedged” their 2017 production, and for how much. Hedging is a concept of pre-selling the gas you produce at a price you agree to now, in advance. Although that may sound risky, it’s actually an exercise in risk avoidance. It’s less risky to lock in favorable prices in advance rather than wait and potentially get far less. How do these drillers know what the prices will be a year from now? They don’t know, for sure, but there is something called the forward market, that predicts what prices will be at future dates. In fact, traders create contracts now based on prices in the future, and those contracts are reported by various news and data services, like 
Last week MDN alerted you to yet another study, in a long line of such studies, issued by anti-drilling zealots pretending to be researchers at Johns Hopkins University (see