NY’s Grotesque Energy Double Standard re “Home Rule”
Here’s one that really gets us hot and bothered. MDN is written from Upstate New York (near Binghamton). We covered, extensively, the battle to allow fracking (and now, natural gas pipelines) in our beloved home state. We won’t plow up old ground again except to say that one of the battles fought, and lost, was over whether or not local municipalities can ban fracking for everyone. Two backwater towns in New York–Dryden (Tompkins County) and Middlefield (Otsego County) passed town bans that were challenged in court. The case eventually went to NY’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. We (pro-drillers) lost. Local towns now have the right to outright ban fracking–if and when it ever becomes legal to frack in New York. Some call it the “home rule” law. This was all done at the prompting and urging of a very corrupt governor–Andrew Cuomo. The judges on NY’s high court are appointed by the governor. It’s the worst kind of incest and miscarriage of justice. So along comes a wind power project that a corporation wants to build in Western NY. Some of the locals don’t want it. If they convince their towns to pass a ban on wind projects for the town, guess what? In that case NY state law will overrule the town and allow the wind project to get built anyway. How, on God’s green earth, is that in any sense fair? Here’s what we hope: We hope at least one of the towns involved passes a ban and it goes to court and they throw the high court’s decision on frack bans right back in their face. It’s time to expose the energy double standard in NY…
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U.S. Bancorp (aka U.S. Bank) is the fifth largest bank in the United States. Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S. Bancorp has over 3,000 branches, mostly in the Midwest. The bank recently released an “Environmental Responsibility Policy” (full copy below). In it, the bank says this with respect to financing pipeline projects: “The company does not provide project financing for the construction of oil or natural gas pipelines. Relationships with clients in the oil and gas pipeline industries are subject to the Bank’s enhanced due diligence processes that are outlined further below.” This is TOTALLY unacceptable. The Energy Equipment & Infrastructure Alliance (EEIA) sent an open letter (copy below) to all officers, directors and shareholders calling on the institution to reverse its discriminatory anti-pipeline policy. MDN is a little more impolitic. We’re calling for anyone with a U.S. Bancorp checking, savings, commercial, or any kind of account, to close it. It’s time businesses like U.S. Bancorp are made to pay for this kind of wrongheaded activism…
Events related (or of interest) to the Marcellus and Utica Shale, primarily pro-drilling events.
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: Enormous economic potential with Appalachian storage hub; Marcellus/Utica pipelines to the Southeast; energy strategy demands tri-state accord; drilling boost property taxes in Columbiana County; PA GOP gov candidate pledges no severance tax; CNG poisted to become more readily available; NGL ‘inflection point’ in WV; Senate hearing for FERC nominees this week; BH rig count climbs for 18th straight week; the great US oil export boom; EPA sets aside $12M for employee buyout scheme; Netherlands gets first US LNG cargo; OPEC net oil revenues lowest since 2004. 
Noble Energy dropped a bombshell that it has sold its 100% interest in 385,000 Marcellus/Utica acres and wells producing 415 million cubic feet equivalent of natural gas in West Virginia and Pennsylvania for $1.225 billion to “an undisclosed buyer” (see 
Platts senior energy analyst Luke Jackson yesterday posted a Platts Snapshot titled, “New Northeast US Gas Pipelines Will be Hard to Fill.” Provocative title. It’s a video. Below is a transcript of the video. In it, Jackson says according to their analysis that drillers in southwestern PA and eastern OH and the northern panhandle of WV will struggle, but eventually succeed, in producing enough natural gas to fill new pipelines coming online this year. But they won’t be able to fulfill their obligations until perhaps December 2017. That is, Antero, Range Resources and Ascent Resources will need to rapidly ramp up drilling–or risk paying for pipeline capacity they’re not using. However, it was Jackson’s comment about pipelines coming online in 2018 and 2019 that really caught our attention. He says in the video: “This new capacity will be nearly impossible to fill, barring a massive ramp in drilling activity, which, per our forecast, is not expected to occur.” So Platts says Marcellus/Utica drillers will not be able to produce enough natural gas to fill all of the new pipelines that will be online by 2019. If we assume the price of natgas goes higher over the next few years (not an unreasonable assumption), what this means is that new drilling is going to ramp up like crazy in the next few years. Buckle up! Here’s the transcript…
Once upon a time (in 2013), the oil and gas industry was expanding so rapidly that in places like North Dakota workers at the local McDonalds were getting a singing bonus and making $20/hour. No lie. Workers on drilling rigs and frack crews were paid a premium to keep working. But we became victims of our own success. So much oil and natural gas was produced, the market became saturated and prices crashed. And along with the price crash, rigs were idled and workers were laid off–in the tens and eventually hundreds of thousands. By the time of the deepest, darkest part of the down cycle (early 2016), some 350,000 workers in the industry had received a pink slip (see 
An economic report released yesterday by the American Chemistry Council (ACC) shows that the Appalachian region could become a second center of U.S. petrochemical and plastic resin manufacturing, similar to the Gulf Coast. ACC President and CEO Cal Dooley presented the findings at a Capitol Hill press event with lawmakers including Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.). “The Appalachian region has distinct benefits that could make it a major petrochemical and plastic resin-producing zone,” Dooley said. “Proximity to a world-class supply of raw materials from the Marcellus/Utica and Rogersville shale formations and to the manufacturing markets of the Midwest and East Coast has already led several companies to announce investment projects, and there is potential for a great deal more.” What will it take to turn our region into another Gulf Coast petchem powerhouse? According to the report, an NGL (natural gas liquids, i.e. ethane) storage hub. You may recall Sens. Capito and Manchin recently introduced a bill to study an Appalachian NGL storage hub (see 
As we have endlessly covered, Shell is in the midst of building a $6 billion ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, PA (see 
It’s so enormously frustrating to live in The Empire State–New York. Which is where MDN is produced. Our illustrious governor, Andrew Cuomo, has drunken deeply from the man-made global warming Kool Aid fountain. Cuomo, a radically left Democrat, may or may not actually believe in man-made global warming. Makes no difference. He, like other lib Dems, find it a useful tool to control the population. If you can control what people use for energy (and what how they pay for health care), you control their lives, period. Cuomo has made a decision to align himself with global warming nutters who oppose all fossil fuels because supposedly said fossil fuels, when burned, release carbon dioxide into the air. CO2 becomes “trapped” in the atmosphere and takes a long time to dissipate, creating (as the disproved theory goes) a “greenhouse effect,” trapping heat and (eventually) catastrophically warming Mom Earth. The problem, that we’ve pointed out countless times, is that empirical data–where people use instruments to monitor “average” temperatures–proves the earth has been cooling for the past 20 years. That little fact never makes it into mainstream media because it destroys the mythology that’s developed around this POLITICAL issue. Global warming is not, as the left pushes, about science. It is about politics. But we digress. Yesterday Gov. Cuomo released burdensome new methane emissions regulations that will further hamstring New York’s wilting conventional (not shale) oil and natural gas drillers. It seems Andy simply wants to extinguish the rest of the industry in our beloved home state…
As MDN alerted you on May 10, President Trump has nominated two highly qualified individuals to serve on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission–Neil Chatterjee and Rob Powelson (see 
As we pointed out last December, evil corporate raider Carl Icahn (invests in companies so he can fire a bunch of people, boost the stock and pocket the profit) had fired Cheniere Energy CEO Charif Souki (see 
It’s not often we read about lease offers these days. We’re sure they happen regularly, but the only ones you read about are offers made to lease publicly owned land. Such offers for public land are a useful gauge for private landowners. So when we noticed a story about an offer made by Arsenal Resources to the North Central West Virginia Airport (Bridgeport), our eyes and ears perked up. The opening offer is for 188.5 acres (out of 500 acres) with a $1,500 per acre signing bonus and 14% royalty on anything produced. The Benedum Airport Authority, charged with managing the airport and property, told the Authority’s attorney to counter offer–they want 15% royalties…