French Investment Firm Buys Out SW Pa. Gas-Fired Power Plant
A power project we’ve been tracking since 2017 is a 620-megawatt (MW) Marcellus-fired electric plant in Greene County, PA, called the Hill Top Energy Center (see our stories here). In 2019, investment firm Ardian, based in Paris, France, announced that it had purchased a 41.9% stake in the project, becoming the majority owner (see SWPA Gas-fired Electric Plant Project Gets French Investment). Ardian just announced it has purchased the other 58.1% stake it did not already own. Read More “French Investment Firm Buys Out SW Pa. Gas-Fired Power Plant”
In December 2022, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) approved permission for New Jersey Natural Gas (NJNG) to build a pipeline regulator station in Holmdel, New Jersey. What does a regulator station do? It reduces pressure on the existing underground natural gas pipelines in the area, which run underneath Holmdel Township and throughout Monmouth County. Ultimately, a regulator station will ensure the reliability of the pipelines and the gas that flows in the area. The new station will replace a currently operating temporary regulator station. Yet the “leaders” of Holmdel voted in 2023 to appeal the BPU decision to court, allocating up to $20,000 of taxpayer money for legal fees, which turned out to be a fruitless attempt at overturning the BPU decision (see 
Dominion Energy and its operations in Chesterfield County, Virginia (near Richmond) are in the news again, but not for the same reason you may think. We previously told you about Dominion’s project to build a “peaker” electric generating plant in Chesterfield (see 
Sometimes it’s hard to figure out why people (and companies) choose to “bite the hand that feeds them.” Here’s a case in point. Last Friday, a group of electric and gas utilities urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to launch an inquiry to consider options for improving gas pipeline reliability. That is, utility companies, fed natural gas by pipeline companies, are asking FERC to tighten regulations on those pipeline companies in order to make it more expensive and harder to do their job. Why? 
Local municipalities with radical political leaders, along with some “blue” states run by radical Democrats, have attempted to strip away the right of their citizens to freely choose which energy source they want to use. It’s about as anti-American as it gets, against the very founding of this country. Yet it happens. Berkeley, California’s “first-in-the-nation” natural gas ban was later overturned by a federal appeals court. Yet recently, two other appeals court cases have ruled in favor of gas-banning municipalities and states. Let’s consider the “shifting landscape” of local and state gas bans… 
Isn’t it shameful how major Ivy League universities, like Cornell, Harvard, and now Dartmouth, sell out to the radicalized left? They offer up (sell) their prestigious names to be plastered on blatantly fake research studies that bash fossil energy. In a new study published in Nature, researchers from Dartmouth College have compromised their integrity, arguing that “attribution science” – the attempt to link a specific amount of greenhouse gas emissions to a particular energy company – should be used. The “researchers” advocate using attribution science not to develop a better understanding of the world, but as a blunt tool in the courtroom to bankrupt the very companies that provide the energy that powers this world. It’s completely insane. 
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Bradford County honors former Gov. Corbett for work on natural gas impact fee; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Australia’s Woodside Energy green lights big U.S. LNG project; NATIONAL: Toyota launches new, commercially focused hydrogen business website; Crude dips to two-week low amid trade war fears; Relief rally lifts natural gas futures back above $3 as May contract expires; Paving the way for America’s energy comeback; How Trump turned around Biden energy policy; Biden’s departure spurs LNG industry growth; Regional balances tell the tale of the U.S. crude oil market; INTERNATIONAL: Weatherford and AIQ sign strategic partnership for AI; What are the latest AI developments oil and gas needs to be aware of?; Climate change, once a big issue, fades from Canada’s election; US sanctions target deliveries of oil and gas to Houthis; Spain slowly returning to normal after crippling blackout; US urges Eastern Europe to split from EU energy transition aims; Canada is squandering the greatest oil opportunity on Earth. 
The Baker Hughes U.S. national rig count crept up again last week, adding two more rigs after adding two in the prior week. The U.S. count now stands at 587 active rigs. The M-U rig count remained the same at a combined 38 last week—the second week in a row. We are at the highest combined M-U count since May of 2024. The Marcellus kept its 25 rigs across the three M-U states of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. The Utica kept its 13 rigs across the same three states, mainly in Ohio. PA had 18 active rigs for the second week — the highest number it has had since last August. OH operated 12 rigs for the second week in a row, the most active rigs in the Buckeye State in over a year. WV dropped maintained eight rigs for a second week, the lowest number of active rigs in the Mountain State since last September. 
This is news of a lawsuit with implications for drillers, rights owners, and surface land owners that we were not previously aware of. EOG Resources, an oil and gas drilling giant with nearly half a million leased acres in Ohio, holds drilling rights on land owned by Lucky Land Management in Ohio—we could not determine the exact location or county. The two sides couldn’t agree on whether EOG’s rights to drill included the right to drill from Lucky Land’s surface out to adjacent properties as well. So EOG sued. EOG then asked a district court to grant a preliminary injunction, allowing the company to access the land to cut down trees and begin constructing wells. The district court did so, finding that EOG would probably succeed on the merits of the case. 
Both conventional and unconventional (shale) drillers in Pennsylvania were required to submit a new annual report to the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) on December 10, 2023, detailing volatile organic compound (VOC) and methane emissions from their operations over the previous year. Shortly before that deadline, the DEP suspended the due date and set a new due date of June 1, 2024 (see 
Every three years, the Pennsylvania Dept of Environmental Protection (DEP) is required, by state law, to produce an update to the state’s so-called Climate Action Plan. The fact that they have such a plan boggles the mind—a plan to address global warming (the operative word being “global”) from one state. To be fair, many states and even large cities also have such plans. These plans are all arrogant nonsense. No entity, especially not a single state, can do a darned thing to affect the temperature of Mom Earth, but they pretend they can. And they use the existence of such plans as a manipulative political tool to force policy changes that inflict significant economic harm on their citizens, all in the name of saving the planet. The wackadoodle left has brainwashed our children into believing we’ll die if we don’t give up fossil fuel use. The DEP recently released its triennial “dump fossil fuels” update, and it’s as crazy as ever. 
For more than four years, MDN has called out the International Energy Agency (IEA) and its executive director, Dr. Fatih Birol, as nothing more than tools of Big Green. We’ve reported on many of the IEA’s perennially wrong (fake) predictions about “peak demand” for oil and natural gas (see 
Last week was another strong week for new permits issued to drill new shale wells in the Marcellus/Utica. For the week of April 14 – 20, the number of permits was down three from the previous week, but still very strong. Last week, 33 new permits were issued in the M-U. In the Keystone State (PA), 25 new permits were issued, a dramatic increase from five two weeks ago. The top permittee was Range Resources, with 10 permits, half of which were in Allegheny County and the other half in Washington County. Seneca Resources received six permits, all of which were in Tioga County. EQT and its subsidiary Rice Drilling also scored six permits, with four in Fayette County and two in Greene County. PA General Energy got two permits in Lycoming County, and Olympus Energy received one permit in Allegheny County.