Jeb Bush Visits Rice Energy in PA, Ticks Off Sierra Clubbers
Looking like he’d had his morning Ensure drink, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush had plenty of energy as he talked about energy policy in a speech he delivered yesterday at the headquarters of Rice Energy in Washington County, PA. As predicted, Bush said things the oil and gas industry can stand up and cheer for: lift the ban on exporting crude oil, make it easier to export natural gas, and repeal some of the onerous regulations now on the books. He would also roll back Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan regulations that target coal (and natural gas) with a regulatory death sentence. Below is how it was reported, followed by Bush’s policy paper on how he would handle energy policy if he were to get out of single digits in the polls and get the nomination (something not very likely)…
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Some 35 anti-fossil fuel wackos, apparently with no jobs, show up during a slow news day at the Statehouse in Trenton, NJ to protest the PennEast Pipeline and news outlets report it as a major story, implying there’s a huge movement against the pipeline. What about the 366,500+ residents who also live in Mercer County and who aren’t opposed to the PennEast and who didn’t turn out to protest it? Is that worth a story? Apparently not. Of course this tiny protest wasn’t spontaneous–it was organized, planned, hyped and paid for by nutty Sierra Clubbers and THE Delaware Riverkeeper (Maya van Rossum)…
Your beliefs matter. For example, if you believe in the fairy tale of man-made global warming (see 
It’s heartbreaking, but not surprising, to see residents in a North Carolina make the same mistakes made by residents in New York State. Monday night the Stokes County (NC) Board of Commissioners voted to enact a three-year moratorium on potential shale drilling in the county. Well-meaning but completely ignorant residents agitated and cajoled the commissioners into voting for no drilling. Stokes, located in northern NC, is part of the Dan River sub-basin, which in turn is part of the larger Triassic Basin. Earlier this year the state cleared the way for fracking to begin (see 
Just last week MDN told you about the bone-headed proposal from a partisan group in West Virginia calling for a doubling or tripling of the severance tax on natural gas liquids–unless those NGLs stay in the state (see 
Investment research service Morningstar is out with their latest “Quarter-End Insights” on energy. The highly regarded service says (a) the price of crude oil won’t rebound anytime soon, and their long-term price projection is for oil to be priced around $64/barrel here in the U.S., (b) even though natural gas production is slowing in the U.S., there’s plenty more ready to go online and therefore prices will remain low for a while–they project a “midcycle” price for natural gas of $4/Mcf; and (c) one of their top three picks for stocks in the energy space is Marcellus driller Cabot Oil & Gas…
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: 10 new Utica permits; enviro benefits of pipelines; PennEast opponents intervene; PA drilling scares OPEC; GE’s digital power plant for gas; lessons from ETE/Williams deal; global warmers want to prosecute climate change skeptics (like MDN); more methane emanating from Philly Clean Air Council; pipelines to Mexico; and more!
In the end, Williams decided that the takeover/merger proposal from Energy Transfer Equities (ETE) wasn’t so indecent after all. In June, ETE’s billionaire CEO Kelsy Warren revealed he had been propositioning Williams for over six months–offering Williams $64 per share to buy the company, totaling $48 billion (see 
Halliburton and Baker Hughes are having a pre-merger garage sale. In order for Halliburton to buy Baker Hughes, a deal worth $34.6 billion (see 
Our intrepid tipster is back with another juicy rumor about Chief Oil & Gas. You may recall that MDN broke the story Chief is closing its main Appalachian office near Pittsburgh, a tip later confirmed by Chief (see 
On January 9, 2014, a Freedom Industries facility next to the Elk River leaked ~10,000 gallons of crude 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol (MCHM) used in coal mining into the river, which is a tributary to the Kanawha River that runs through Charleston, WV. The results of that leak were dramatic. Some 300,000 residents from nine counties in the Charleston metropolitan area were without access to potable water for five days. Several Freedom Industries officials are now in jail and the company went bankrupt because of that single accident. Contrast coverage of that accident with another accident–caused by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at the Gold King Mine in Colorado. EPA personnel were fiddling around “testing” at a gold mine wastewater storage impoundment and accidentally unplugged it, dumping 3 million gallons of some of the nastiest wastewater you can imagine–with lead, arsenic and other heavy metals–into the Animas River north of Silverton, CO (see 
It takes guts to walk boldly into the liberal lion’s den and tweak the nose of the beast. That’s what Marty Durbin, chief executive of America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA), has done with an editorial appearing in yesterday’s Boston Globe newspaper. Durbin has the audacity to tell readers that their high energy bills and constrained natural gas supplies is “self-imposed.” He also tells them they can believe whatever they want, but they can’t defy the laws of supply and demand and there is no arguing the fact that New Englanders pay high energy prices because they lack necessary natural gas supplies. Just a few hundred miles away natgas prices in the Marcellus are a fraction of what gas sells for in New England. Marty pours it on! He also says a recent study shows without new natgas supplies for New England, by 2020 the average consumer will pay almost $1,000 more per year in energy costs than they do today. Read Marty’s audacious editorial for yourself below, full of cold, hard truth. Let’s hope New Englanders will see the light–which happens to be a blue natural gas flame…
The Washington County (PA) Firemen’s Association recently opened a new $500,000 gas well training center at the fire academy located at 895 Western Ave in Houston, PA. The project, which took more than a year to plan and complete, was completely funded by some of the biggest and best drillers in the Marcellus/Utica, including Range Resources, Rice Energy, CONSOL Energy, EQT, American Well Service and others. It will be used to train first responders not only in Washington County, but also from other parts of Pennsylvania along with West Virginia and Ohio. According to Pennsylvania Fire Commissioner Tim Solobay, “There’s nothing like it outside of Texas”…