Duke Energy Modifies/Scales Back Plan for SW OH Pipeline
Duke Energy Ohio, an LDC or “local distribution company” serves some half a million customers with natural gas in Ohio. The company has a ~12 mile pipeline to flow gas it needs to move from one point to another in Hamilton County, the southwest corner of the state. The Duke pipeline has been around and in service since the 1950s. Duke needs to replace that pipe or some of the half million Duke customers won’t get natural gas any more. Because anything to do with “fracking” or “pipelines” has been so thoroughly bastardized by the media and anti-drilling whack jobs, there was, of course, opposition to Duke’s plan. So Duke “listened” and has scaled back their plans. Instead of building a 30-inch gas pipeline running at 600 psi (pounds per square inch), the revised plan calls for a 20-inch pipeline running at 400 psi. Duke has proposed two potential routes (see the map below). Here’s the lowdown on Duke’s scaled-back, tiny pipeline project in Hamilton County called the Central Corridor Pipeline Extension Project…
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Dominion launched a $4 billion, 25-year Pipeline Infrastructure Replacement (PIR) program in mid-2008. The program involves replacing over 5,500 miles of Dominion’s 22,000-mile pipeline system. Most of the pipeline to be replaced was installed in the first half of the 1900s. Some of the pipeline (much?) is being done in Ohio. The pipelines Dominion wants to replace in Ohio are regulated by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO). If Dominion wants to do anything with or for the pipelines in Ohio, they first need PUCO permission. Dominion has sought, and now received, PUCO permission to expand the program in Ohio. Dominion currently spends $160 million per year on the program in Ohio. PUCO gave them permission to up that amount to $170 million next year and $200 in 2018. Why is that important? Because Dominion gets to “recover” the costs (i.e. charge the costs) to utility customers. Dominion customers in Ohio can expect to see a rate increase…
David Hill is a geologist and a driller located in Ohio (David R. Hill Inc.). At a recent Coffee and Commerce meeting sponsored by the Cambridge Area Chamber of Commerce, Hill offered his insights into when oil drilling may return to Guernsey County and eastern Ohio. As MDN recently reported, much of the focus on drilling in the Utica has lately turned to dry gas, or methane only (see 
Yesterday MDN reported the story that Dominion Transmission has decided to lock out union members from working at their jobs in Dominion installations over a contract dispute (see 
Virulent anti-fossil fuel nutters who are opposed to Spectra Energy’s $2 billion, 255-mile NEXUS interstate pipeline that will run from Ohio through Michigan and eventually to the Dawn Hub in Ontario, Canada, have stayed up late at night reading through all of the comments sent to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The habit of antis is to generate a blizzard of negative comments to FERC on any given project, sometimes using the names of their children (see 
This story is almost too good to be true. Researchers from Ohio State University have been analyzing the genomes of microorganisms (i.e. bacteria) that live in Utica Shale wells. (Who would think to do something like that?) The researchers “have found evidence of sustainable ecosystems taking hold there–populated in part by a never-before-seen genus of bacteria they have dubbed ‘Frackibacter.'” Translation: There’s little communities of microscopic critters that live in those shale wells, including a brand new critter that lives only in fracked Utica Shale wells. The hypothesis is that fracking itself created this new mutated life form. The researchers are calling it Frackibacter (we think it’s pronounced frack-uh-back-tor). We have a better name: Frackenstein! Yes ladies and gentlemen, step right up to witness this fracking freak of nature–a bacteria created from fracking itself. Who knew fracking didn’t destroy life, but actually creates it?! Below is an article about the discovery, along with a copy of the peer reviewed paper published in the journal Nature Microbiology announcing the discovery of this new fracked life form…
This is an update to a story MDN ran last week observing that Utica drillers have slowed (or stopped) their wet gas drilling work and instead have shifted to drilling Utica wells, in Ohio, in the dry gas areas (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!…
In 2015 CONSOL Energy temporarily quit all new drilling activity. In July of this year, they said they would restart their drilling activities, targeting the Ohio Utica (see 
Two radical environmental groups in Ohio–Ohio Environmental Council and the Clean Air Task Force–have just released a 100% bogus “report” that attempts to tie asthma in children to fracking. If lying to the public were a crime, they’d be in jail right now. Here’s how these sleazy groups make such a claim: They claim, from looking at medical records, that there are 7,129 childhood asthma attacks in the Columbus metro area, and 7,558 in the Cleveland metro area each year. Absolutely no context as to whether those numbers are higher or lower than elsewhere in the country, or whether or not the numbers are increasing year over year. These groups just toss out numbers. They claim the asthma attacks are because of smog in those cities. They further claim smog comes from burning oil and gas and ergo, childhood asthma attacks are the result of fracking, because fracking extracts more oil and gas which is burned and causes smog which causes asthma. It is a heaping mound of cow manure. The problem is that otherwise good news sources, like the Akron Beacon Journal, push this manure out as news…
Listen up Ohio landowners and drillers: there are important new changes coming in the way oil and gas reserves are taxed, starting THIS YEAR. One such change: tax bills will now only be issued to producers (i.e. drillers) and NOT to royalty interest holders (i.e. landowners). Therefore drillers will be responsible to collecting taxes owed by landowners. The new changes will “significantly change how the ad valorem tax is collected” and because of the changes, it will be “very important” for drillers to accurately report production volumes to the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR). Here’s a rundown of the changes from the legal beagles at top energy law firm Vorys…
In June MDN told you about an economic development group of business and government leaders from Ohio and West Virginia (the Mid-Ohio Valley) called Shale Crescent (see 