Williams Tries, One Last Time, to Garner Support for ETE Merger
Yesterday Williams published a letter from Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS)–a “leading proxy advisory firm”–recommending that shareholders in Williams should vote “yes” on the merger with Energy Transfer Equity (ETE). Williams will hold a special shareholder’s meeting on Monday, June 27, to vote on the proposed merger. Even if a majority votes in favor of the merger–far from a foregone conclusion–it’s still not a done deal. ETE continues to assert that expert opinions on the taxability of the merger may scuttle the deal. Just a few weeks ago ETE sued Williams to abort the deal (see Midstream Soap: ETE Sues to Walk Away from Williams Takeover Deal). We view all of this–voting for the merger, etc.–as posturing. Fodder for the lawyers to use after the deal fails to consummate. Here’s the latest in our ongoing soap opera that we call, As the (Midstream) World Turns…
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Not long after Michael Krancer was appointed Secretary of the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection in 2011, he “requested” (which was more order than request) that municipal sewage treatment plants still accepting and processing Marcellus drilling wastewater stop the practice. At the time there were 15 plants accepting Marcellus wastewater. Under pressure from Krancer, they ended the practice in May 2011 (see 
For some time now we’ve had our eye on Bear Head LNG, a $2.2 billion LNG export project proposed by Australian company Liquefied Natural Gas Limited (LNGL), to be built in Nova Scotia, Canada. In August 2015 the Canadian National Energy Board (NEB) approved LNG exports for the project. In February of this year the U.S. Dept. of Energy also gave its blessing, because the gas it will export will largely come from the Marcellus/Utica region (see 
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: Ohio has 12 rigs running, 1 new Utica permit; Kinder Morgan donates $15K to Wooster YMCA; hope that Wolf will back off on severance tax; Rogersville Shale drilling at stand-still; Maine needs more natgas; large stockpiles of natgas choking price rally; Speaker Ryan unveils plan to roll back Obama enviro regs; and more!
The silent pipeline-supporting majority became more vocal last night at a second hearing in as many days for the Williams Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline. Monday night’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) public hearing was a circus-like freak show, complete with one crazy wearing a cape like he’s Superman (see 
We have to confess this story completely escaped us–until now. But we think we know why. We spotted a story (below) in a Wheeling, WV newspaper about an Ohio driller who was caught–back in 2011–dumping about 50 gallons per week of brine from some of his oil wells into an open ditch in Monroe County, OH. The story implies the brine (i.e. wastewater) is from fracked wells. The story is wrong. The brine is from conventional oil wells, not fracked shale wells. The driller/operator of the wells is one Donald Hercher and he’s just been sentenced to four days in jail, two years of probation, and a $70,000 fine. Aside from setting the record straight, the reason the story interests us is because of several other aspects of Hercher’s punishment–he’s being forced to write and publish an article in three trade journals “to educate readers on the ‘Waterways of the U.S.'” and to donate $5,000 to a private organization…
Anti-fossil fuel crazies have found a new cause: force investors to dump their investments in the oil and gas industry. The crazies hope by doing so that public companies like Exxon Mobil will crash and burn–and remove fossil fuels from the energy mix. It’s an LSD hallucination–but there you go. (Note: Many in the fossil fuel divestment movement are burned out hippies.) The crazies have tried this with a number of liberal colleges. The dolts who run Syracuse University fell for it (although they didn’t have much in the way of fossil fuel investments anyway), while New York University rejected calls to divest, calling such a strategy irresponsible (see 
In 2013, Dominion announced a 20-year deal to export 100% of the output from their planned Cove Point, MD LNG plant. All of the Marcellus gas from Cove Point will get exported to both India and Japan (see 
As a counter to onerous new regulations being pedaled by the out-of-control Obama Environmental Protection Agency, the American Petroleum Institute recently issued a statement pointing out the government itself–the Dept. of Energy and the EPA–have authored research reports that extol the virtues of hydraulic fracturing–i.e. “fracking.” The API’s statement says that the environment *benefits* from fracking, rather than suffering. After all, Uncle Sam says so in its own research…