$14 Million in Fed Grants Flows to Upstate NY to Replace Gas Pipes
A local community receiving a federal grant of $14 million (arranged by a local Congressman) to improve natural gas infrastructure, like replacing worn-out gas pipes, is a fairly common occurrence across most of the country. But it’s not a common occurrence when the community receiving the grant and doing the work is located in New York State — a state that is utterly hostile to even a single square inch of new natural gas infrastructure. That’s what makes this story so unusual, so “man-bites-dog” in nature. Bath and Woodhull (both in Steuben County, NY) are receiving a combined $14 million to replace nearly 18 miles of natural gas pipelines.
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Here’s a story that caught our attention. Empire Energy, which drills for oil and gas in Australia’s Beetaloo/McArthur basin, owns producing oil and gas assets in New York State and Pennsylvania, which cover more than 270,000 net acres. Empire’s U.S. assets have output totaling some 4.5 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of gas plus small amounts of associated liquids from approximately 2,400 conventional wells. Empire is selling their U.S. assets for $9.1 million to a privately owned conventional producer — PPP Future Development. The intriguing part of this story is that Empire also owns drilling rights in the Marcellus and Utica shale layers underlying the conventional wells in New York State.
The radicals who run the New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) are gearing up to block the Iroquois Gas Transmission system from completing its Enhancement by Compression (ExC) project. ExC increases horsepower at three compression stations — two in New York and one in Connecticut — by an extra 125 MMcf/d, flowing more Marcellus/Utica gas into New York City and New England (see 
National Fuel Gas Company (NFG) and its pipeline subsidiary Empire Pipeline have worked on a plan to build the Northern Access Pipeline since 2016. Northern Access is a 97-mile project from McKean County in Pennsylvania into and through Allegany, Cattaraugus, and Erie counties in New York that will flow Marcellus gas into New York State. The project was repeatedly delayed by the radicals of the Andrew Cuomo (now Kathy Hochul) administrations in NY. NFG still wants to build the project but needs more time. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) gave NFG an extra 35 months to get the project done in a decision in June 2022. The Sierra Club challenged FERC’s time extension. On Friday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (DC Circuit) rejected the Clubbers and said FERC properly extended the time to build the project.
The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) is shopping for a public relations firm that can help the agency convince gullible New Yorkers that they’re better off paying more money for unreliable renewable energy than they are in using fossil fuels like natural gas. NYSERDA is offering $500,000 for a one-year contract to help the agency tout its wide-ranging push to phase out gas cars in favor of electric vehicles, dump gas-heated homes in favor of electric heat, and eliminate fossil-fuel power generation in favor of solar and wind. While they’re at it, maybe they can sell you a bridge in Brooklyn, too.
Where do business dreams go to die? New York State, of course. Yesterday, the New York State Senate passed a bill to ban the use of carbon dioxide (CO2) in any process to extract natural gas or oil in the so-called Empire State. The NY Assembly (our state’s lower chamber) voted to approve the same bill a week ago (see 
Last month, MDN told you that several New York Democrat legislators introduced a new bill to ban the use of carbon dioxide (CO2) in any process to extract natural gas or oil in the Empire State (see 
A group of so-called environmental advocates (old hippies) gathered in Albany at the Capitol yesterday to continue their call to ban all “fracking,” including CO2 (carbon dioxide) used to extract natural gas. We wonder if they know that a total ban on “all” fracking includes a ban on fracking geothermal wells being pushed by the governor.
You can’t read about energy in mainstream media these days without seeing multiple stories about geothermal energy and the big push to force-convert homes and businesses to use geothermal as a way of saving the planet from nasty/evil fossil fuels. Yet geothermal uses the same identical drilling rigs, drills the same holes in the ground, and even uses the same fracking technology as that used to drill shale oil and gas wells. But drilling and fracking for geothermal is righteous and clean and pure as wind-driven snow, while drilling and fracking for oil and gas is evil, Satanic, and destroying the environment. How does that work?
In December 2019, New York Attorney General Tish James and her highly-paid associates were thoroughly, completely, 100% humiliated in court when their case against Exxon Mobil, accusing the company of screwing shareholders by keeping secret knowledge they are toasting Mom Earth, was itself toast (see 
Here’s the kind of thing you don’t want to read about. Utility giant National Fuel Gas Company, headquartered in Buffalo and parent to Seneca Resources and NFG Midstream (and Empire Pipeline), is suing a former employee and several vendors for buying and installing counterfeit parts at several compressor stations. One such part caused the temporary shutdown at one compressor station in New York’s Southern Tier when the part failed to work correctly.
The Iroquois Gas Transmission pipeline project called Enhancement by Compression (ExC) increases horsepower at three compression stations — two in New York and one in Connecticut — by an extra 125 MMcf/d, flowing more Marcellus/Utica gas into New York City and New England (see 
In June 2019, the New York State legislature passed a horrific “energy” bill that was later signed into law by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (see