End is Near: PA AG Kane’s Law License Suspended by Supreme Court
As we have been reporting for months, Pennsylvania’s anti-drilling Attorney General, Kathleen Kane, committed perjury (a felony) by lying under oath about leaking grand jury information to a reporter in an attempt to smear a political “enemy” and she should have resigned and left office long ago–but she’s too obstinate to do that. In PA the AG is required to have a license to practice law. Her license has just been suspended (not yet revoked) by the PA Supreme Court, which raises an interesting constitutional question: Can Kane be forced from office because she can’t practice law, the thing she was elected to do? Everybody, including American’s most liberal governor, PA Gov. Tom Wolf, wants her gone. But she refuses to leave and continues to stammer and yammer about porno emails and conspiracies by old men out to get her…
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In April 2014, MDN told you about a proposal from Clean Energy Future to build an $800 million electric generation plant in Lordstown (Trumbull County), OH. The plant will be fired by natural gas from the Utica and Marcellus (see 
Shell continues to work (and spend money) on a site in Beaver County, Pennsylvania that will one day hopefully be the home of an ethane cracker plant. The most recent positive sign that Shell will move forward with the project is that they are in the process of building a bridge over a highway for trucks to access the site as they work on site preparation and building (see 
Seems like just about every pipeline project out there is, in one way or the other, connected to the Marcellus/Utica Shale and moving northeast shale gas to other markets. Example: Yesterday Columbia Pipeline Group announced they have received Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approval to proceed with the Cameron Access Project in Southwest Louisiana. The $310 million project includes improvements to Columbia Gulf’s existing pipeline system, as well as ancillary facilities, a new compressor station near Lake Arthur, Louisiana, and the installation of an approximately 26 mile greenfield pipeline lateral in Cameron Parish that provides direct access to the Cameron LNG export facility. The purpose of the project? It “further connects abundant, but constrained, Appalachian supplies to higher value markets.” In other words, Columbia will offer a new export market for Marcellus/Utica gas via the Cameron LNG export terminal. The project is due to begin construction in the spring of 2016 and be placed in service during the first quarter of 2018…
Global research firm Wood Mackenzie recently published a brief analysis of LNG export facilities asking the question, Where are all the LNG project postponements? According to Wood researchers, the outlook for global LNG demand is looking increasingly subdued–particularly in China. The number of LNG projects proposed to make a Final Investment Decision (FID) in 2015 and 2016 has not reduced significantly. If all or close to all of the projects on the books make a FID to move forward, there would be an unsustainable glut of new LNG supplies–without a corresponding amount of demand around the globe. Wood Mackenzie’s conclusion? Companies will soon wake up to the fact that there won’t be enough demand and we will see “a raft of project postponements” in the next 6-18 months…
In another sobering bit of analysis by global research firm Wood Mackenzie, the company tells drillers that while their hammering of the supply chain (like oilfield services companies) to reduce prices by 20-30% will help, it will only result in an overall 10-15% savings. If drillers want to keep their drilling projects “viable” (i.e. profitable), “additional measures” will be needed to manage costs. Wood Mackenzie researchers have a few suggestions for how drillers can continue lowering costs to the point their projects are, once again, turning a profit in a low oil and gas price world. If they don’t lower costs more, there’s a mind-blowing $1.5 trillion worth of shale projects that are “at risk” of not happening…
Vermonters have finally woken up to the fact that they’re paying obscenely high electric rates–especially since they mothballed the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon, VT. The pastoral, gentile and very green residents of Vermont, you may recall, decided to become the first state in the union to ban fracking, back in 2012 (see 
Listen up everyone who has an interest in Pennsylvania’s midstream–pipelines and processing plants. Billions of dollars are being spent in Pennsylvania as the gas industry builds out its pipelines to all parts of the northeast, Middle Atlantic, southeast and Midwest regions of the U.S. The two questions everyone wants to know: (1) Who is spending the money? and (2) Where is the money being spent? The answer to those two questions and more will be answered at the 
Next Tuesday, Sept. 29, West Virginia State University (WVSU) will sponsor a forum on fracking and shale at WVSU’s James C. Wilson University Union in Institute, WV. The forum, titled “Fracking: In the Beginning Was the Source Rock” is free and open to the public. Keynoting the event will be award-winning Wall Street Journal energy reporter Russell Gold, who authored the book “The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World.” This is a unique opportunity to hear (and ask questions) of someone with expert insights into the shale revolution in the Marcellus/Utica and beyond–and what he sees on the horizon for the future…
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: OH landowners ask FERC to delay Rover; DEP continues listening sessions in Pittsburgh; fossil fuels not going away; another natgas boom on the way; rig counts continue to slide; tortoises win over hares in unconventional; producers’ margins razor thin; throwing out the lending rulebook; and more!
Dominion’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) faces some stiff opposition from the anti-drilling, landed gentry class, along with opposition from the usual anti-fossil fuel nutters and even opposition from Obama-controlled agencies including the BLM, FWS and USFS (see our 
Finally! Some new takeaway capacity for Seneca Resources is about to become reality when they begin shipping Marcellus Shale gas from western Pennsylvania through Kinder Morgan’s Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP) Niagara Expansion into western New York State where it will connect to the TransCanada Pipeline (in Niagara County, NY) and from there send the gas into Canada. In 2013 MDN brought you the good news that TGP would expand service on the pipeline northward (see 
Last Thursday the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission issued its first order addressing the issue of forced pooling. The Commission upheld a forced pooling order against Ohio landowner Gary Teeter Trust (Ronald Roudeush is the trustee of the trust) by reaffirming that Ohio’s pooling and unitization provisions work to protect landowners–even those landowners like Roudeush who prefer not to be part of a drilling unit–by fairly compensating them. Rex Energy has leased land around the Teeter Trust (in Carroll County, OH) and sought to include 71 acres of the Teeter Trust property in a drilling unit, which Roudeush objected to and appealed. We have a copy of the decision below along with a further explanation of the case from the legal beagles at the Vorys law firm (the firm representing Rex Energy in the case)…
The September edition of our favorite government report, the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Drilling Productivity Report (DPR), shows an interesting change from the August report. In August, the EIA predicted that for the coming month (September) every single major shale play of the seven plays they track, including the Marcellus and Utica, would see a decline in the amount of natural gas produced (see 
The one ethane cracker plant project announced for the Marcellus/Utica region that once seemed the mostly likely to proceed now seems the least likely to move forward–the Brazilian-based Odebrecht project planned for Wood County, WV. The ASCENT (Appalachina Shale Cracker Enterprise) project seemed to have the most momentum in 2014 (see 
Something we’ve noticed for some time: When Magnum Hunter Resources (MHR) and its subsidiaries (like GreenHunter and Eureka Hunter) make a pronouncement like “such and such will be online next month” or “so and so asset will be sold this quarter” the timing rarely matches the pronouncement. For Magnum Hunter “the next few weeks” turns into “the next few months” and “sometime this quarter, maybe next” turns into “next year.” Somebody else has noticed MHR’s timeline peculiarity too–and has written about it on the Seeking Alpha investors website. This particular post notes that MHR’s CEO Gary Evans announced he would name the winning bidder in the “next week to 10 days” for the Eureka Hunter midstream subsidiary, a deal that will bring in something like $600-$700 million (see