Anti-Drilling/Fossil Fuel | Energy Services | Industrywide Issues | Litigation | NEXUS Pipeline | Ohio | Pipelines | Statewide OH
Antis Continue to Use NEXUS Case in Effort to Emasculate FERC
Last December MDN told you that even though NEXUS Pipeline, a $2.6 billion, 255-mile interstate pipeline that runs from Ohio into Michigan is built and has been fully online since November, the Coalition to Reroute NEXUS (CORN), along with the City of Oberlin, Ohio, filed yet another lawsuit (with the D.C. Court of Appeals) to nullify the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) original decision to approve the project (see CORNballs Return, Ask DC Court to Shut Down NEXUS Pipe).
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A new study just published in the peer reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters by an international team of researchers finds that natural gas “has half the carbon footprint of underground coal mining.” The researchers looked at (did measurements of, actual real science) methane in the atmosphere by flying transects over the southwestern portion of Pennsylvania and adjacent portions of West Virginia and Ohio. Marcellus/Utica central. One of the researchers from Penn State said this about the findings: “Obviously, renewable energy would be better, but there is no debate, switching to natural gas is worth it in the short run.”
A pipeline feeding the MarkWest Hopedale Fractionation Facility in Jewett, Ohio was knocked offline last Sunday, and that outage caused a cascading effect throughout the region that forced three gas processing plants in West Virginia to temporarily scale back (or stop) operations, which further caused a ~2.1 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) decrease in gas flows on two interstate gas transmission pipelines. The good news is that the problem is now resolved.
A few weeks ago the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program (OOGEEP) published a new resource for those interested in checking out the many (many!) job opportunities there are working in the oil and gas industry. Not a list of open positions at specific companies, but a list of jobs and careers. Everything from administrative assistant and attorney to welder and workover rig supervisor. But this isn’t just a laundry list of 75+ careers/jobs, it includes a detailed explanation of what each job does, the amount and type of education required, and a list of places (in Ohio, of course) where you can receive training for that type of job. This is an awesome resource!
Yesterday MDN told you that Pin Oak Energy Partners has purchased Protégé Energy’s 10,000 acres of Utica Shale leases (and other assets) located in Washington and Noble counties in Ohio, and Wood County in West Virginia (see 
Holy Toledo! Enbridge, a really big pipeline company headquartered in Calgary, Canada, is in the process of buying the 23-mile Generation Pipeline located in northwest Ohio for $100 million. Enbridge owns the Texas Eastern Transmission Company (Tetco), as well as a 50% share in the NEXUS Utica Shale pipeline in the Marcellus/Utica region. It is that later project, NEXUS, that prompted Enbridge to pursue a purchase of Generation Pipeline.
Listen up landowners in Washington County, OH: For some of you, your shale lease may now be owned by someone else. Pin Oak Energy Partners, a relatively young Marcellus/Utica driller based in Akron, OH, has purchased all of Protégé Energy’s Utica Shale leases (and other assets) located in Washington and Noble counties in Ohio, and Wood County in West Virginia. The vast majority of the lease transfers are in Washington County.
EdgeMarc Energy, headquartered in Canonsburg, PA (with 45,000 acres of Marcellus/Utica leases), is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, looking to sell all of the company’s assets. The reason? They can’t move their production to market because their main pipeline partner, Energy Transfer’s Revolution Pipeline, exploded last September and ET has not been able to get the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection to allow them to restart it.
Advanced Power Services finally breaks ground…TODAY…on building an 1,100 megawatt Utica-fired electric plant in Columbiana County, OH (see 
The former Blue Ridge Mountain Resources (formerly Magnum Hunter Resources) and Eclipse Resources tied the knot and merged at the end of February, promptly renaming itself Montage Resources (see 
Saudi Arabia is sniffing around the Marcellus Shale. Bloomberg reports that super secret talks are happening between Saudi Aramco (largest oil company in the world, owned by the Saudi government) and Equinor, which until recently was called Statoil. Equinor is majority-owned by the government of Norway. The Saudis are considering “buying a stake” in or possibly a joint venture with Equinor. It seems Norway is hesitant to hop into bed with the Saudis. We don’t blame them.
Every now and again we traffic in rumors here on MDN, but we do so rarely and only when we trust the source of the rumor. In mid-March we brought you juicy tidbits from a highly trusted source about the PTT Global Chemical ethane cracker project in Belmont County, OH, a rumor about why a final investment decision (FID) to proceed has been delayed (see 
CNX Resources released its first quarter 2019 update yesterday, which shows the company lost $87 million, as opposed to making $527 million in profit in 1Q18. Even so, CEO Nicholas DeIuliis announced the company is upping its drilling budget from the previously announced $700 million to instead spend $885 million, largely to drill more “deep dry” Utica wells. Go big or go home!