Details on Newly Announced Trumbull Energy Center Electric Plant
Yesterday MDN ran an important story about 10 proposed (or already under construction) Utica Shale gas-powered electric plants planned for Ohio (see List of 10 Utica-Powered Electric Plant Projects Coming to Ohio). Tucked in the list of 10 projects is a brand new project, officially announced just yesterday, in Trumbull County. MDN readers already know about this project. Last June, Massachusetts-based Clean Energy Future broke ground on their $800 million, 940-megawatt Utica gas-fired electric plant in Lordstown (Trumbull County), OH (see Lordstown Energy Center Breaks Ground on $890M Electric Plant). Construction is under way and the plant will go online in 2018. In February of last year, MDN reported that the owner of the Lordstown Energy Center project, Clean Energy Future, was considering building a second plant at the same site (see Lordstown, OH May Get Second Utica Gas-Powered Electric Plant). The rumor was correct. In November, one of the companies partnering on the project, Fluor Corporation, spilled the beans and announced the second power plant, to be called the Trumbull Energy Center, would indeed get built. However, the project’s main sponsor, Clean Energy, has been mum on the project–until now. Yesterday afternoon the project was officially announced. We have the particulars on this new, second power plant that will be bigger than its older twin…
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We always find it distressing when companies begin to tap dance to please corporate raiders. That is apparently what is now happening at Marathon Petroleum, owner of MarkWest Energy. We don’t pretend to fully understand what’s happening (this is all high finance stuff), but our impression is that Marathon is “dropping down” certain assets (i.e. moved from one legal corporate entity to another) more quickly than it otherwise would have, due to pressure on the company from Elliott Management, a so-called activist investor in the company. “Activist investor” is what used to be called “corporate raider” 25 years ago, which are companies or people who invest just enough in a company to control it, forcing the company to shed assets and fire people in order to boost the stock price–just to turn around and sell and make a quick buck. Apparently Elliott wants Marathon to a) move assets around from one company to another PDQ, and b) consider spinning out Speedway into its own company, or selling it. Speedway, you may or may not know, is Marathon’s retail gas filling station business. Speedway bought out and merged in the old Hess filling stations (see 
Maryland is a lot like New York–populated with lefty liberals who love to tell other people how to live their lives. Maryland went through a years-long process, just like New York, and eventually released what would likely be the strictest drilling regulations in the nation, in late 2014 (see 
Energy Transfer Equity (ETE), owner of more than 62,500 miles of natural gas and natural gas liquids pipelines, with many miles in the Marcellus/Utica, has just gone a cash-raising bender. ETE is, by the way, the owner of the planned Rover Pipeline–a $3.7 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. On Monday the company announced they have raised $580 million in cash by selling new 32 million new units (think shares of stock). In addition, yesterday the company said it had floated new notes (IOUs) worth nearly $1.5 billion. Wow! Add it together and the total is over $2 billion–a serious pile of cash. What are they doing with all that cash? Paying off old debt…
As is so often the case, when leftists/liberals claim they are doing one thing, it is, in fact, the opposite they are doing. Case in point: Obama’s Dept. of Energy (DOE) Secretary Ernest “hair” Moniz has released an 11th hour “scientific integrity” policy for the DOE that supposedly inoculates and protects “real” scientists who work for the agency from politics–allowing them to freely vomit their political, whoops, scientific views whenever and wherever they want, without fear of retribution or losing their job. What it does is to set up a situation where the incoming Trump Administration (specifically Rick Perry, the new DOE Secretary) are handcuffed to a bunch of leftists in the department–people who insist on the fairy tale of man-made global warming. If Perry wants to clean house, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, along with lawsuits that it violates agency policy. This is a typical sleazy move by the Obamadroids to dirty things up before they leave town–scorched earth policy. In case you think we’re engaging in hyperbole, the Union of (Liberal) Concerned Scientists are “thrilled” with the new policy. Need we say more?…
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is fresh out with analysis of wholesale electricity prices in 2016 and finds electric prices were down for the year primarily because of the low price of natural gas–and the switching currently under way from coal to natgas. EIA says for the first 10 months of last year electric generating plants paid an average of $2.78/Mcf (thousand cubic feet) for natgas–down 17% from the same period in 2015. Because of the ongoing switching from coal to natgas, EIA says electricity generated from natgas power plants rose 6% in the first 10 months compared to the same period a year earlier. The truly astonishing factoid from EIA: “Natural gas was the primary source of U.S. electricity generation (when measured on an annual basis) in 2016 for the first time.” Here’s the full EIA analysis…
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The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: Cuomo’s war on NY energy; another round of leases in the Utica Shale in the works; Rex Energy closes on asset sale; Monroe County leads surge in OH drilling permits; PA pipeline on verge of approval; short-term outlook for natgas prices; the next big innovation in oil & gas; and more!
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf is…what adjective can we use? Recalcitrant. Stubborn. Pigheaded. Stupid. Perhaps all of the above. Wolf is clearly in over his head and the most ineffective PA governor in more than a generation. When he assumed office in 2015, he floated a budget calling for a new 5% severance tax on the Marcellus industry–a tax which even his supporters admitted would be closer to 17% (see 
Enough is enough. As MDN reported last June, anti-drilling zealots in Youngstown, OH filed a petition to place a frack ban resolution on the November ballot–for the 6th time (see 
In June 2015 MDN told you about a really cool plan by a Pennsylvania company to establish a CNG (compressed natural gas) terminal in Lycoming County, PA as a way to get natural gas to manufacturers, fleets and businesses where no pipeline infrastructure now exists (see 
In October EQT announced a deal to buy Trans Energy, Inc., a public pure-play driller in the Marcellus in West Virginia, which will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of EQT (see 
Williams issued three press release on Monday that we’re still trying to figure out. Williams, like many other midstream (pipeline) companies has maintained a weird corporate structure whereby Williams the mother ship is a different corporate entity from Williams Partners, the main operating company. Once upon a time Williams had plans to merge the two together–but that all got mothballed when they ended up first fighting against, then trying to merge with Energy Transfer Equity (see 