Dem Candidate for NJ Gov Opposes PennEast, After He $upported It
There is a primary and general election later this year for the office of governor in New Jersey. Democrats are crawling all over themselves to try and win the nomination. All of them have made the PennEast Pipeline a campaign issue by opposing it (“I hate it”…”No, I hate it more!”). It is an appeal to the unhinged, radical environmental movement in the state–a movement that seems to have much more power than its size suggests it should. In what we find rather amusing (and disgusting, at the same time), the leading Democrat candidate, Phil Murphy, previously invested in the companies that are behind the PennEast Pipeline project. Now he says he opposes the pipeline… Read More “Dem Candidate for NJ Gov Opposes PennEast, After He $upported It”
Envelope please! (No, this is not Warren Beatty, we have the correct envelope!) Each year the Ben Franklin Shale Gas Innovation & Commercialization Center (SGICC) runs a contest and awards a $20,000 prize to three companies ($60,000 purse) for the “best shale energy-oriented innovations, new product ideas, or service concepts that are either in the development stage or recently launched” in the Marcellus Shale. This year’s winners were recently announced: Frontier Natural Resources, Inc. won for commercializing the first small scale LNG facility in Pennsylvania, using natural gas from an adjacent gathering and compression facility. PetroMar Technologies, Inc. won for commercializing FracView™, a low-cost borehole imaging tool that takes high resolution pictures, even through drilling mud. And Sensor Networks, Inc. won for its product line of permanently installed battery powered ultrasonic sensors, providing remote, wireless data collection of critical pipe infrastructure wall thickness. Here’s the deets… 
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: Utica Shale adds another rig, Marcellus remains steady; heavy equipment apprentices train in PA; Cheniere offers $1 billion in notes; 3 important deadlines in Trump energy plan; concerns about reliability of natgas for electric generation overblown; OPEC needs to cut more; Mexico increasing US imports of natgas; and more! 
Increasingly landowners (and anti-fossil fuelers, sometimes one and the same) are attempting to employ the use of local law enforcement to prohibit pipeline companies from surveying their land–especially in Virginia. Survey crews for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a $3.5 billion, 301-mile pipeline that will run from Wetzel County, WV to the Transco Pipeline in Pittsylvania County, VA, have the right under Virginia State law to enter a property without the property owner’s permission to survey–as long as they have sent a prior notice to the landowner with target dates of when they will be on location. However, some landowners (very small percentage) don’t want the pipeline and don’t want surveyors on their property–and have had their lawyers tell them so. When surveyors recently turned up on one property, the landowners called the State Police. The State Police (as well as local police) have a stated policy that they do not interfere with non-criminal matters. And surveying a property legally is not a criminal matter. However, the troopers came out and had a quick talk with the surveyors. The troopers did not eject the surveyors per se, but soon after the troopers left the surveyors did too. This is troublesome and problematic. Did the troopers put undue pressure on the surveyors to leave? Should the troopers have come to the property at all? Does the landowner have culpability in calling the cops for a non-criminal matter, wasting the troopers’ time?… 
As MDN began reporting last week, Energy Transfer’s Rover Pipeline, a $4 billion, 711-mile Marcellus/Utica natural gas pipeline that will run from PA, WV and eastern OH through OH into Michigan and eventually into Canada, has quickly become a soap opera. MDN brought you the news that Energy Transfer’s Rover Pipeline project has been fined by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) for $431,000 for “18 incidents involving mud spills from drilling, stormwater pollution and open burning at Rover pipeline construction sites have been reported between late March and Monday” (see 
A group of landowners in Ohio calling themselves the Coalition to Reroute Nexus (CORN), whom we affectionately call CORNballs, have filed a lawsuit in court against the NEXUS pipeline project. Not to actually reroute NEXUS, but to kill it. To stop it. The landowners are asking a federal court to block the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) from allowing the project to proceed–which of course is not going to happen–and to legally bar the NEXUS Gas Transmission project from building the pipeline. Which has been the aim of the CORNballs from the beginning–contrary to the party line that they just want it rerouted around them. The CORNballs seem to be in league with antis in the City of Green, OH, who recently voted to give $100,000 of taxpayer money to high-priced Cleveland lawyers to try and stop NEXUS (see 
Here’s a story we LOVE! As we previously reported, anti-fossil fuel “protesters” (i.e. paid thugs) in North Dakota, there to try and stop the Dakota Access Pipeline from being completed (which didn’t work), left a major mess behind when they finally moved on (see 
There has been a slight delay from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in the approval process for Dominion’s $5 billion, 594-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline–a natural gas pipeline that will stretch from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina. On Friday, FERC issued an official update to Dominion to say that instead of issuing a final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on June 30, 2017, as previously promised, the agency will now provide the final EIS on July 21, 2017–three weeks later. The final EIS is an important step in the process–perhaps THE most important step. When/if FERC issues a positive EIS that finds a project will not cause undue environmental harm, it’s usually all over. Yes, other steps are involved, but a final approval is then a foregone conclusion. So IF the final EIS is delivered on July 21, a 90-day clock begins ticking. FERC will then have until Oct. 19 to deliver their final final final approval of the project…
“Stupid is as stupid does.” – Forrest Gump. New England needs more natural gas. Why? Because they heat with it, but more importantly, because the produce electricity with it. New England has the highest electric rates in the country–up to four times higher than other regions. These are indisputable facts. In early 2014 all of the six New England state governors sent a letter supporting new pipeline infrastructure to bring cheap, abundant, clean-burning Marcellus Shale gas to New England (see 
Events related (or of interest) to the Marcellus and Utica Shale, primarily pro-drilling events.
Somebody somewhere isn’t telling the truth. Earlier this week MDN brought you the news that Energy Transfer’s Rover Pipeline project has been fined by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) for $431,000 for “18 incidents involving mud spills from drilling, stormwater pollution and open burning at Rover pipeline construction sites have been reported between late March and Monday” (see 