MVP Will Boost WV Gas Producers – Coming Online in “7 to 8 Weeks”
West Virginia natural gas drillers are excited at the prospect of the soon-opening Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), which will carry WV gas 303 miles from Wetzel County, WV, to Pittsylvania County, VA. During a recent meeting of the West Virginia Legislature’s Joint Standing Committee on Energy and Manufacturing, the CFO of Pillar Energy said it’s only a month or two until MVP will be online and flowing. Hallelujah! We [the O&G industry] were finally able to get this one done.
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Last week, the Baker Hughes rig count regained a couple of rigs; for the first time in five weeks, the count has gone up instead of down. The count went from 617 active rigs two weeks ago up to 619 last week. Since last October, the national count has gone as low as 616 and as high as 629. And that’s it. No higher and no lower. The Marcellus/Utica lost one rig last week and now runs 41 rigs. Pennsylvania remained constant with 22 rigs; Ohio lost a rig and now operates 11 rigs; and West Virginia remained the same with 8 rigs.
Two weeks ago, for April 1 – 7, there were eight new permits issued (see 
West Virginia Public Broadcasting recently sat down with Charlie Burd, president of the West Virginia Gas and Oil Association (GO-WV), to ask him about the Mountain State’s role in supplying natural gas to the global market. The discussion covered a number of topics, including who are the biggest gas producers in WV, pipelines, including the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), and why WV still has not added any new natural gas-fired power plants to its electric generating fleet.
In February, West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore sent notices to six financial institutions warning them of potential inclusion on the state’s Restricted Financial Institution List (can’t do business with the state) after his office made an initial determination that the institutions appear to be engaged in boycotts of fossil fuel companies as defined under state law (see 
Hopefully, we’re now at the conclusion of an effort to overturn a bill passed in early 2022 by the West Virginia legislature, Senate Bill (SB) 694, which finally brought forced pooling for shale wells to the Mountain State after eight years of trying (see 
According to the data geeks at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), U.S. natural gas production grew by 4% in 2023, which was similar to the growth in 2022. U.S. gas production in 2023 averaged a whopping 125.0 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day). In 2023, more natural gas was produced in the Appalachia (Marcellus/Utica) region of the Northeast than in any other U.S. region, accounting for 29%, or 37.7 Bcf/d, of gross natural gas production. However, production growth in Appalachia slowed because our region doesn’t have enough pipeline takeaway capacity to transport more natural gas out of the region to the markets that would buy it.
Finally, a little legal action to push back against Joe Biden’s “pause” on approving new LNG export applications. In January, Joementia announced he would “pause” any approvals for new LNG export plants (currently 17 requests in the pipeline) for at least one year while his people fart around pretending to figure out how to measure global warming as a new consideration for whether or not to approve projects (see 
In February, MDN brought readers the news that Tenaska, one of the largest privately operated companies in the U.S., is building a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) hub spanning tens of thousands of acres in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia (see