The Key Issue that May Decide Whether Wyalusing LNG Gets Built
Earlier this month, MDN brought you the great news that New Fortress Energy’s (NFE) proposed Wyalusing LNG export plant (in Bradford County, PA) and a docking facility in Gibbstown (in New Jersey, along the Delaware River) to load ships with PA-produced LNG, are not dead yet (see Northeast PA LNG Plant Lives! NFE Tells FERC Still Wants to Build). So if they aren’t dead, if NFE is still interested in building and has already spent $150 million on site preparation, what’s keeping the project stalled? We’ve just come across an article that does an excellent job of crystalizing where we are and why the project has not yet moved forward — and perhaps why it will not get built.
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For more than a decade, MDN has brought you stories about shale development on and under land controlled by the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District (MWCD), an agency formed in 1933 to help control flooding and promote water conservation in the Muskingum River watershed area of Ohio, an area that covers 8,000 square miles (
Last December, WATT Fuel Cell Corp. signed a seven-year extension of its lease to keep its headquarters in Westmoreland County, PA (see 
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Casey pushes for changes to proposed hydrogen production tax credit; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: US regulator seeks new emissions data from Venture Global LNG; NATIONAL: Hess wins shareholder vote for merger with Chevron; Securing our nation means securing our LNG future; INTERNATIONAL: Dryad says attacks on commercial vessels in Red Sea drop.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally-owned electric utility corporation in the U.S. TVA’s service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. TVA is the sixth-largest power supplier and the largest public utility company in the country. Last May, TVA announced that it would convert the Kingston Fossil Plant (coal-fired plant) in East Tennessee to a natural gas-fired plant capable of generating 1,500 megawatts of electricity (see 
More than 50 “groups” colluding with ringleader Ohio River Valley Institute (ORVI) sent a letter to the Department of Energy (DOE) calling for the suspension of the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub (ARCH2), falsely claiming an “extreme lack of transparency” and lack of “meaningful community engagement” during project negotiations. Translation: The ORVI and its band of fossil fuel bigots are mad because they don’t know exactly where to go to protest each element of the ARCH2 project. They want to bully local municipalities and politicians to block hosting any element of the multi-million-dollar project. How rude of the DOE not to make it easy for the ORVI.
The price of natural gas is, in one sense, complex, with lots of variables depending on where the gas is bought and sold. On the other hand, it can be boiled down to a simple-to-understand formula: Supply and demand. Of course, it is the factors that go into supply and demand that make it so tricky to nail down and predict! Weather and LNG exports are big factors on the demand side. Production and storage are big factors on the supply side. A number of Marcellus/Utica drillers have scaled back on production. In the month of May, according to analysts with S&P, storage levels are “below average” due to more gas being used to keep houses air-conditioned (natgas is used to generate power, leaving less to be stored for next winter).
In January, President Biden announced he would “pause” any approvals for new LNG export plants (currently 17 requests in the pipeline) for at least one year while his people fart around pretending to figure out how to measure global warming as a new consideration for whether or not to approve projects (see 
LNG (liquefied natural gas) that is exported from the U.S. to Asia takes one of three routes to get there. One route is via the Panama Canal, crossing into the Pacific Ocean and on from there. Another is via the Atlantic Ocean to the Suez Canal and from there via the Red Sea, which connects to the Indian Ocean. The third way is sailing through the Atlantic Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope off the southern tip of Africa. In the past, both the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal were the preferred routes, shaving weeks from the journey. However, given recent events, the dynamic has completely changed. Now, the preferred route is the longest route — around the Cape of Good Hope.
In 2020, Congress mandated a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to assess the U.S. Coast Guard’s ability, methods, and role in conducting the certificate of compliance (COC) program for the foreign-flag tanker ships known as liquefied gas carriers (LGCs) and to consider the need for statutory reforms. The National Academies released its report yesterday with recommendations for how the Coast Guard can and should update its LNG carrier certification program.
Nearly a year ago, MDN brought you the news that the federal EPA had issued a permit to G2 STEM LLC based in Fairfax, Virginia, to build a Class IID oil and gas wastewater underground injection well in Young Township, Jefferson County, PA (see 
We have been tracking and reporting on the drama surrounding Austin Master Services (AMS), a radiological waste management solutions company in Martins Ferry ( Belmont County), Ohio, located close to the Ohio River (
One of the aspects of the Austin Master Services (AMS) story (from Ohio) that captures people’s attention is that the frack waste at the facility contains drill cuttings, some of it with a low level of radioactivity. The headline-grabbing media touts that aspect of the story, overplaying just how “radioactive” it actually is. “OMG! If that stuff gets into the Ohio River, it’s an ecological disaster!” That sort of thing. While the percent threat to public health from AMS’ stored drill cuttings is not zero, it’s also not 100. We need a little balance added to the discussion. Just how much of a threat is the waste in the AMS facility?
Yeah, the bottom pretty much fell out of the rig count last week, both nationally and for the Marcellus/Utica region. We’re hitting new lows with both counts. For the M-U, Pennsylvania stayed the same with 21 active rigs, but Ohio lost one rig, and West Virginia lost two rigs last week, for a net loss of three — 37 active rigs across the region, the lowest in more than a year. The national rig count hit 600 last week, the lowest it has reached since January 2022. Ugh.