New LNG Bunker Barge Comes to Port of Savannah, Georgia
Some exciting news to share related to the Marcellus/Utica. Shipping company Crowley announced it had accepted delivery of the LNG bunker barge Progress, the largest U.S. Jones Act-compliant vessel of its kind, after construction was completed at Fincantieri Bay Shipbuilding in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. The Progress will expand access to cleaner energy for ship operators at the Port of Savannah, Georgia, upon final commissioning there this month. Shell signed a long-term agreement with Crowley to operate the barge, providing another fueling location to ships using liquefied natural gas. You may recall that Kinder Morgan owns and operates the Elba Island LNG liquefaction facility in Savannah and contracts all of Elba Island’s LNG production to Shell. Are you beginning to see the dots connect?
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MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Cenovus Energy shuts down unit at Ohio refinery; Teachers provided with lessons and materials on the natgas and oil industry; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Chevron, Hess merger delayed further as arbitration hearing set for 2025; NATIONAL: Dems are ‘starting to recognize’ green energy push ‘all a fallacy’; Major CCS pipelines inch closer to reality; Kamalaflage: Dems race to expunge the evidence of Harris’ leftist history.
This is so frustrating. A panel of three extremely liberal (wildly left) Democrat judges sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals — two appointed by Joementia and the other appointed by Lord Obama — have overturned a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approval of the $1 billion Transco Regional Energy Access Expansion (REAE) project that is already up and running and delivering extra natural gas supplies to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland. The three-judge panel ruled that FERC didn’t seriously consider man-made global warming when approving the project. The frustrating thing is that FERC is NOT an environmental agency; it’s an economic agency. Look it up — it’s in the FERC charter. Yet the libs are now demanding FERC become something it is not, an environmental agency that considers mythical global warming before it can approve new pipeline projects. Mission accomplished for the Bidenistas and Obamadroids. No doubt the Cackleistas would also approve of this bastardization of FERC.
Chesapeake Energy issued its second quarter 2024 update yesterday. Due to the low price of natural gas, Chesapeake promised (in 1Q) that it would curtail roughly 25% of its production. The company kept its word. Chessy’s 2Q production was 24.9% lower than the same period in 2023. Production was 2.745 Bcfe/d in 2Q24 versus 3.653 Bcfe/d in 2Q23. Interestingly, the company’s production was ALL (100%) natural gas — no oil and no NGLs were produced last quarter. Chessy lost $227 million last quarter versus making $391 million in profit in 2Q23. The company used an average of eight rigs to drill 30 wells and place four wells on production. It built an inventory of five drilled but uncompleted wells (DUCs) and 24 deferred turn-in-lines (TILs). Chesapeake is currently operating seven rigs and two completion crews, having dropped a rig in the Marcellus in July.
DT Midstream (DTM), headquartered in Detroit, owns major assets in the Marcellus/Utica region and other regions like the Haynesville. DTM issued its second quarter 2024 update yesterday. Of keen interest to us was any talk of the company’s Phase III expansion to the Appalachian Gathering System and an expansion in the Tioga County gathering system. To understand the comments coming from yesterday’s update, we need to go back to the first quarter 2024 update…
Last week, MDN exclusively brought you the news that the CEO of American Environmental Services, which owns Austin Master Services (AMS), had filed a brief with Belmont County Court to either forgive or reduce a $1.2 million bond needed to keep the CEO, Brad Domitrovitsch, out of jail (see 
PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. power grid operator, published the results of its latest electricity auction yesterday. PJM serves 65 million people in 13 states plus the District of Columbia (including PA, OH, and WV). The latest auction for delivery of electricity in PJM in 2025/26 produced a wholesale price of $269.92/MW-day. That is a massive 933% increase from the $28.92/MW per day cost for delivery in 2024/2025. Of great interest to us is the overall mix of how PJM’s electricity gets generated. The auction (for 2025/26) shows a diverse mix of resources, including 48% produced by gas, 21% by nuclear, 18% by coal, 1% by solar, 1% by wind, 4% by hydro, 5% by demand response and 2% from other resources. We hear the constant drumbeat by mainstream media pushing renewable energy, yet solar and wind are producing a minuscule 2% of PJM’s electricity. How does that square? We are fed whoppers every day from mainstream news about the so-called ascendance of renewable energy.
PJM, the grid manager for Pennsylvania, twelve other states, and the District of Columbia, is worried about future energy needs. As existing power plants come offline and lawmakers seek to replace them with woefully inadequate alternatives, PJM estimates electricity shortages as early as 2027. PA Gov. Josh Shapiro isn’t helping matters with his disastrous energy proposals (see 
This is a case of everybody pointing at somebody else. Natural gas with contaminants (dirty gas) flowed through pipelines to Fairmont State University (in Marion County, WV), which “significantly damaged boilers, gas lines, valved and regulators and other structures and equipment on the college campus” in September 2021. The university sued the local utility company providing the gas, Hope Gas. In return, Hope said that *if* the gas was not clean, it was not their fault. They got the gas from Eastern Gas Transmission and Storage (EGTS), formerly owned by Dominion Energy but now owned by Berkshire Hathaway Energy.
You really can’t make this stuff up. A big picture is splashed across the pages of the Baltimore Sun website showing anti-fossil fuel nutters protesting “burning oil and gas indoors” (i.e., protesting the continued use of fossil fuels in stoves and furnaces). They were there to lobby the state Public Service Commission to disallow spending on new natural gas pipelines of any kind (local delivery, statewide transportation, etc.). Two of the protesters were dressed up as characters from The Flintstones. Both costumes were made from plastics — from oil and gas. That is, they were there protesting fossil fuels and WERE TOO STUPID to know they were wearing fossil fuels! Hilarious!!
Oglethorpe Power is investing more than $2.3 billion in two new natural gas-fired power plants to supply its 38 member cooperatives with an additional 1,400 megawatts of electricity to meet escalating demand across residential, commercial, and industrial sectors. We think some, perhaps most of the gas that will feed these two new plants will come from the Marcellus/Utica.
In September 2019, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) gave its blessing to Eagle LNG to build a small LNG export facility project at a site on the St. Johns River in Jacksonville, Florida (see 
Lansing (Michigan) Board of Water and Light (BWL) is committed to the false premise that humans are catastrophically warming the planet. BWL has a clean energy plan that includes building solar, wind, and battery storage. However, solar and wind — even with battery storage — are intermittent and unreliable. That’s just a fact. In order to use MORE solar and wind, BWL needs to install a small (very small) natural gas-fired peaker plant that will turn on during periods of high demand, periods when solar and wind and battery backup can’t meet the demand. In other words, natgas will make using more renewable power possible. And still, antis who irrationally hate fossil fuels are protesting the peaker.
As you may have noticed, a number of our posts today are stories about gas-fired power plants, which are vitally important (very big) customers for shale gas. According to an analysis by Reuters, natural gas use by power generators has expanded by around 3.5% a year over the past three years and is by far the largest single source of gas used in the U.S. However, natural gas consumption by the other major sectors, including industry, households, and commercial, is falling each year. The fall in usage by industry, etc., is more than the growth in powergen.