A Sad Milestone: 10 Years Today Since NY First Banned Fracking
My heart breaks for my fellow New Yorkers. Who could possibly have thought 10 years ago that a decade later there would still be no shale drilling in New York State? MDN’s “right hand man,” Chris Acker, was awake at the stroke of midnight last night and snapped the screenshot below, marking the exact 10-year anniversary for NY’s frack ban. The ban first started as a “temporary” moratorium–as these things always do. “Just give us a little more time to get the regulations right.” The “little more time” turned from months into years, and years have accumulated into (now) decades. It’s the standard liberal/anti playbook: Delay, Deny, and then Defend the indefensible actions taken. Our beloved state is rife with corruption–at the highest levels. Everyone knows our governor, Andrew Cuomo, is corrupt. A number of the people around him, some of his closest confidants, are either in jail or on trial. But somehow he escapes the long arm of the law. Cuomo has caved to pressure from his extreme left in directing the Dept. of Environmental Conservation to not only ban fracking, but also block and obstruct pipelines. It is sick and disgusting. Cuomo has stripped Constitutional property rights away from thousands of New Yorkers–and nobody says or does anything. This is how tyranny takes root and grows. NY is a case study. Look at the country of Venezuela today–that’s what NY will be in 30 years. Come back and read it here on MDN 30 years from now (when we’re dead and gone) to see that we were right. At any rate, as long as we have breath, we will continue to fight the good fight against the forces of evil and darkness here in NY…
Read More “A Sad Milestone: 10 Years Today Since NY First Banned Fracking”
This is a bitter and sad day. The five Commissioners of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) released a decision yesterday (copy below) that FERC will not overrule an illegal decision by the corrupt Cuomo Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to block construction of the Constitution Pipeline (which FERC approved in 2014). Is this truly “lights out” for the Constitution? It would seem so. Cuomo’s DEC took more than two years to evaluate and eventually reject the Constitution Pipeline–a $683 million, 124-mile pipeline from Susquehanna County, PA to Schoharie County, NY to move Marcellus gas into NY and New England (see 
As we pointed out earlier this week, New England now has the dubious distinction of paying the highest prices for natural gas–in the world (see 
In 2015 MDN told you about an Allegany County, NY attorney who had filed a lawsuit against the New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) over their infamous frack ban. It was the first such lawsuit to be filed against the DEC since the frack ban was officially declared (see 
The Millennium Pipeline stretches ~244 miles from Independence in Steuben County, NY to Buena Vista in Rockland County, NY. The Millennium, which is supplied by local production and storage fields and interconnecting upstream pipelines, serves customers along its route in New York’s Southern Tier region and helps meet the energy needs of northeast markets. In August 2016, the Millennium filed an application for what it calls its Eastern System Upgrade (see 
Only in New York State do you find this kind of lunacy. Yesterday Consolidated Edison (Con Ed), one of the nation’s largest investor-owned energy companies, announced a request for proposals (RFP) looking for an alternative to building a new pipeline to get more natural gas into New York City–where the gas is desperately needed. Yes, pipelines are the safest mode of transportation in existence. Yet Con Ed wants something less-safe. Why? They don’t say, but no doubt to avoid dealing with the increasingly violent enviro left that opposes anything to do with fossil fuels–particularly pipelines. In Con Ed’s RFP they throw out some helpful hints at what enterprising businesses might consider proposing: “energy efficiency” (i.e. turn the thermostat down); “beneficial electrification of space or water heating” (i.e. use electricity instead of natural gas for water heaters and heating your apartment); “demand response programs” (i.e. use less by shifting the time when you use the gas); “provision of biogas” (use biogas–cow farts–instead of filthy fracked gas). Dead last on the list: “distributed natural gas storage, CNG, or LNG”–if you *must* propose using natural gas, figure out how to get it into the city without a new pipeline. Use less-safe tanker trucks, or figure out how to store gas from existing pipelines. Most of Con Ed’s proposed solutions aren’t about getting more gas into NYC, they’re about using less gas overall. Yeah, only in New York…
Freedom in New York State is all but gone–snuffed out by a corrupt dictator by the name of Andrew Cuomo. Warning to other states: Be careful who you elect in high office. Cuomo is not content to simply destroy the drilling industry in NY–he wants to destroy anything to do with fossil fuels. Crude oil from the Bakken in North Dakota has, for some time, arrived in New York’s capitol city of Albany via rail cars where the oil is loaded on barges at the Port of Albany for a quick trip down the Hudson River. Cuomo went after those rail shipments, trying to slow them down or stop them altogether (see 
We found this story illustrative of the rank hypocrisy so prevalent in our beloved home state of New York. Even the most cursory follower of shale energy knows that our corrupt governor, Andrew Cuomo, decided to ban shale fracking in the Empire State in 2015 (see 
THE Delaware Riverkeeper herself is back with more of her overlord’s money to file yet another frivolous lawsuit against a pipeline project in New York State. In August 2016, Millennium filed an application for what it calls its Eastern System Upgrade (see 
Iroquois Gas Transmission System is a natural gas pipeline that brings gas from eastern Canada to the New York City area. It is owned by TransCanada Corporation, Dominion Resources, KeySpan Corporation, New Jersey Resources Corporation, and Energy East Corporation. There have been plans, for years, to connect the Constitution Pipeline to the Iroquois and flow Marcellus/Utica gas to Canada by converting Iroquois to be bidirectional. As we all know, the Constitution has been stalled since 2014 because of the corrupt State of New York blocking it. There’s still hope that Constitution will get built. In October they asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to override the New York and allow the project to proceed (see 
We live in a different world here in New York State–MDN’s beloved, lifelong home state. We suppose it’s like living in East Germany just after The Wall was built. Our wall is not physical but political. Even so, it’s just as real. Our state has become something of a socialist/Communist dictatorship. Our Constitutional property rights have been stripped away. Some private companies are actively opposed and frustrated by our governor, who then turns around and doles out taxpayer money to other private companies who are his cronies. We have no shale drilling, and no prospect of it until Cuomo is voted out of office. He’s even taken to stopping pipelines. Fortunately some pipelines, like the Millennium, were built before Cuomo caught the green fever. However, if you try to expand existing pipelines, say by running a 7.8 mile spur to an electric power generating plant that’s almost built, Cuomo will try and stop you. He’s like a hostile war lord in a third-world country. A tinpot dictator. Operating a pipeline in such a climate is not easy. It brings to mind stories of missionaries who put their own lives at risk to travel to hostile lands to bring religion to the heathen–whoops, to the indigenous population. One such pipeline missionary operating in New York is Michelle Hook, director of public relations for the Millennium Pipeline Company. How does Michelle do it, without going crazy?…
Last week lawyers for National Fuel Gas Company and the New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) were in federal court doing battle over the DEC’s arbitrary and capricious rejection of an important Marcellus pipeline project. Three years ago NFG proposed and filed to build the Northern Access Pipeline project–a $455 million project includes building 97 miles of new pipeline along a power line corridor from northwestern Pennsylvania up to Erie County, NY. The project also calls for 3 miles of new pipeline further up, in Niagara County, along with a new compressor station in the Town of Pendleton. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) granted final approval for the project in February of this year (see 
A small group of people whose bubble isn’t in the center of the level staged a “protest” on Saturday in Long Beach, NY (Nassau County), nominally against the Williams Rockaway Delivery Lateral pipeline project. The Rockaway project adds 3.2 miles of new Transco pipeline and related facilities in New York, from the Marine Parkway Bridge in Far Rockaway to offshore in the Atlantic Ocean. The protesters’ stated reason for opposing the project? Not because it may disturb underwater ecosystems. Not because it would temporarily disrupt the lives of those living nearby during construction. Not because of fears over water contamination. No. The stated reason is, “for the end to burning fossil fuels” and because they want NY state “to convert to renewable energy by 2030.” It is, literally, an impossibility to end the use of fossil fuels within the next 100 years. But these idiots refuse to use logic and reason. So now they’re targeting a minuscule 3 mile pipeline in an effort to vent their irrational rage. Meanwhile, up the Hudson in Westchester County, a different small group of nutters also gathered on Saturday to vent their rage for the same reason (anti-fossil fuel extremism), except the focus of their rage is Spectra Energy’s Atlantic Bridge Pipeline project…
We spotted a rather long and (to us) convoluted article about an experiment a New York City-area utility is conducting. National Grid (electric and gas utility) and their software partner AutoGrid are going to “use the latest demand response technology from the electricity world for natural gas.” That is, they are going to use software hooked to hardware to control how much natural gas is used by (so far) 16 customers signed up for the service. Supposedly it will work out bottlenecks in delivering natgas to customers–somehow reducing the amount of gas used overall. And that’s where our understanding falls down. How can you use software to use less gas–unless you are forcing someone’s thermostat to be turned down? We don’t get it. But supposedly this is the latest and greatest in technology. What did catch our attention in the article was a short passage about the coming electricity shortage NY faces because we lack natural gas pipeline infrastructure to fire gas generating plants. Specifically, New York and Long Island will soon face massive electricity shortages–unless utilities figure out how to force customers to lower their thermostats so they can use the gas to generate electricity…
It’s “game on” between the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC). The DEC had arbitrarily, after more than one year of review, ruled against issuing a federal water crossing permit for a tiny 7.8 mile pipeline Millennium needs to build from its main pipeline to an electric generating plant under construction in Orange County. The power plant is due to be completed in early 2018, and needs a fuel supply. In a historic decision, FERC overruled NY DEC in September (see