API Runs “I Am An Energy Voter” Ads – Are They Effective?
If you’re anything like us, you’re TIRED of the political commercials that play ad nauseam on television and radio. At least with junk mail and newspaper advertisements you can safely ignore them. But lately the political commercials for local races (not even counting Trump & Clinton) on TV and radio threatens our sanity. Watching the evening news is impossible due to these commercials. But our eyes and ears perked up we heard a different kind of political ad–something called, “I am an energy voter.” The ads were created and are sponsored/paid for by the American Petroleum Institute. Just prior to the election the API has ramped up these ads, extolling the virtues of oil and gas production, and encouraging voters to consider casting a vote “for” energy. We’ve heard these ads on local radio and TV. As good as these ads are, we found ourselves wondering, what is a vote “for” energy, anyway? The ads are nonpartisan–they don’t identify a candidate that is “for” energy. So we wonder if these ads, while good, are just a big vanity spend on the part of the API. Are the ads having an impact? Is the message of being “for” oil and gas being driven into viewers’ psyches?…
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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: Impact of northeast gas demand on Marcellus production; Garrett County panel considers regulating drilling; shale has been a giant boon to OH economy; Phila. Energy Solutions laying off workers; natural gas rodeo; why the shale band will break; natgas prices will heat up as oil drilling cools off; and more!
Kinder Morgan’s UTOPIA (Utica To Ontario Pipeline Access) pipeline is a 12-inch ethane pipeline that will run ~240 miles and will only be built in Ohio–therefore the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) won’t be involved in permitting the project. In September we noted that Kinder Morgan is still facing opposition from some Ohio landowners (see 
We remember watching Marlin Perkins on “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” growing up. For the younger generations, it was a TV program roughly the equivalent of watching today’s Discovery channel. In particular we remember watching a wildebeest being taken down by a pack of jackals. The jackals would watch for an advantage–a wildebeest that was old and slow, or wounded, or maybe too young to keep up with the herd. They would single it out and one after another jump on it to bring it down. That’s the image that floated through our heads as we noticed a sudden surge of law firms filing class action lawsuits against Chesapeake Energy. No, these lawsuits have nothing to do with Chesapeake shorting landowners in their royalty checks–there’s already a bunch of those lawsuits. These lawsuits are new and stem from the recent announcement that the U.S. Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission and even the U.S. Postal Service have launched investigations into Chesapeake (see 
Gas Natural Inc., a local distribution company (LDC), or “gas utility” company has operations in four different states, including Ohio. Gas Natural also owns pipelines and processing facilities. Gas Natural has just sold itself to energy investment firm First Reserve for $139 million…
MDN previously reported that the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) planned to publish the final regulations in the Oct. 8 Pennsylvania Bulletin (see 
Let’s be honest: Pennsylvania already has a severance tax. It’s called an impact fee + corporate income tax. The combination of the two taxes in PA levies a collective “tax” on drillers as high OR HIGHER than other oil and gas states, like Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. To enact a new/extra severance tax on PA drillers, as Democrats like Sen. John Yudichak (Wilkes-Barre area) propose to do, would kill off what little drilling is happening in PA. It would make drilling in PA unprofitable. Yet Yudichak and others in his party see the recent PA Supreme Court decision as an excuse to push, one more time, for a severance tax. What is it about Democrats and their insatiable lust for your money?…
The Baker Hughes rig count, watched closely by those in the industry (the benchmark used across the world) has been trending up in the U.S. since July. BH released their venerable count for September on Friday and once again the counts have gone up–very good news indeed. BH is reporting an average of 509 active rigs in the U.S., up 28 from August. MDN performs its own rig count for the Marcellus/Utica, using BH’s numbers for Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. The Marcellus/Utica rig count was up for the second month running. In September the M/U rig count jumped up by 7. The biggest gainer was Pennsylvania, up by 5. West Virginia was up by 2, and Ohio stayed even…
In June, Shell announced a final investment decision (FID) to move forward with building a multi-billion dollar ethane cracker plant in Pennsylvania (see 
On Sept. 30 MDN editor Jim Willis attended S&P Global Platts’ 