NY DEC Approves Iroquois Pipe Expansion…With $1.5M “Contribution”
You can include this in one of the Lesser Miracles. Last Friday, at the direction of New York Governor Kathy Hochul, her Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) approved permits to expand two Hudson Valley compressor stations along the Iroquois gas pipeline. The Iroquois Gas Transmission’s Enhancement by Compression (ExC) project will increase horsepower at three compression stations — two in New York and one in Connecticut — by an extra 125 MMcf/d, to flow more Marcellus/Utica gas into New York City and New England. The two NY compressor expansions include one in Dover and one in Athens. The CT compressor expansion is located in Brookfield. Another CT compressor will get minor upgrades (gas cooling, no extra compression) in Milford. The DEC approved the permits for the NY compressors *if* Iroquois pays $1.5 million to the “Disadvantaged Community Benefit Program.” Read More “NY DEC Approves Iroquois Pipe Expansion…With $1.5M “Contribution””
Expand Energy is the new company formed from the merger of Chesapeake Energy with Southwestern Energy. Expand is essentially Chesapeake Energy 2.0. Expand CFO Mohit Singh spoke at last week’s 2025 NAPE Summit in Houston. He had some fascinating things to say, including this: “Just to be clear, in our view, at least 75% of the natural gas demand growth is going to come from LNG.” He called LNG demand “durable” and reliable. AI (artificial intelligence) data center demand for natural gas, on the other hand, is volatile and “noisy,” according to Singh. 
In 2022, after the shocking news that U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (from West Virginia) had sold out his state and the entire country by agreeing to support the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) bill, the details began to come out about just how bad the bill really is for the oil and gas industry. First and foremost, it slaps a new tax on oil and gas activities (see 
The European Union’s idiotic methane regulations will be enforced beginning this year. Domestic (European) oil, gas, and coal companies must monitor, measure and report their emissions. The same restrictions will also apply to energy imports coming from other countries, including the U.S. (see 
Their policies and laws of the left end up costing the average person big money and result in the opposite of what those policies and laws were intended to produce. New York Governor Kathy Hochul and her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo (both far-left Democrats), have shoved the Big Green agenda down the throats of New Yorkers for years. Their laws and policies have sought to eliminate the use of natural gas and force the use of electricity as the preferred energy source instead. Here’s a concrete example of how those policies have produced the exact opposite of what they profess to seek. The New York Post has an article about a New York City landlord forced to give up clean, efficient natural gas to heat his apartment building and switch to burning far-dirtier fuel oil instead. Why? Because Hochul’s policies (and Consolidated Edison’s complicity with those policies) have forced the price of using natural gas to skyrocket. 
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Behind the oil industry’s biggest divorce – Chevron vs California; NATIONAL: How a ‘cow fart’ vaccine could help tackle climate change; House passes bill blocking future presidents from banning oil drilling without approval; The trillion-dollar A.I. data center tsunami – coming to a field near you; INTERNATIONAL: Activist Elliott said to build stake in struggling oil major BP; Taiwan looks to buy Alaskan natural gas as it seeks to head off US tariffs. 
For the week of Jan 27 – Feb 2, the number of permits issued in the Marcellus/Utica to drill new shale wells recovered from the previous week. Two weeks ago, only 7 new permits were issued. Last week, the number increased to 22 new permits issued. Whereas the Keystone State (PA) issued no new permits two weeks ago, PA issued 13 new permits last week. Six of those permits went to Apex Energy in Westmoreland County. Five permits were issued to EQT (Rice Drilling) in Greene and Lycoming counties. And two permits went to Expand Energy (Chesapeake) in Bradford County. 
We previously reported that INR (Infinity Natural Resources), which drills exclusively in the Marcellus/Utica region, floated an initial public offering (IPO) that brought in money on the high end of expectations and that the newly issued stock immediately started trading some 10% higher (see 
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management, is about to fly drones equipped with magnetometers to sniff out orphaned oil and gas wells in Van Wert County. The ODNR previously completed drone flights in Auglaize, Hancock, Mercer, and Wood counties. The ODNR issued a press release to inform (warn) about the upcoming flights, no doubt to prevent the mass hysteria we’ve seen in recent months about drone flights along the Eastern seaboard. 
Do the editors of the Wall Street Journal read Marcellus Drilling News? No, we don’t expect they actually do. Although the editorial published by the editors of the WSJ on Feb. 4 looks like it could have been written by your humble MDN editor—because it says all the things we’ve said for months about Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and his attempt to blame the PJM Interconnection grid for causing high electricity prices that have, in reality, been caused by Shapiro and his “green” policies. 
We spotted some news on the investor website GuruFocus that surprised us. Major investment firm Wellington Management Group made “a significant” addition to its portfolio by acquiring 10,406,240 shares of Coterra Energy on Jan. 31. The company paid $27.72 per share, a $288 million investment. But that’s not the biggest surprise. Wellington already owned a significant number of shares. With the addition of the recent 10.4 million shares, Wellington now owns 81,616,253, or 11.1% of Coterra’s total shares. Wellington is one of the largest investor/owners of Coterra Energy. 
At the end of the last legislative session in December, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, an extremist liberal, signed into law a new climate bill forcing a short list of Big Oil companies to pay $75 billion in “recovery” assessments over the next 25 years for their alleged role in causing mythical global warming (see 
We’ve been pretty hard on Equinor since 2018 when Statoil changed its name to Equinor, apparently ashamed of being associated with the term oil (see