NATIONAL: Tellurian counters speculations over company sale; Enbridge plans to lay off six percent of workers; WaPo editorial board slams Biden’s move to halt natgas terminals; Kennedy vows to block Energy, State nominees over Biden LNG pause; INTERNATIONAL: Activist investor says BP is wrong to set oil output reduction target; Rishi Sunak’s net zero targets are ‘path to ruin’ says Tory MP.
Read More “Other Stories of Interest: Wed, Jan 31, 2024”
Both conventional and unconventional (shale) drillers in Pennsylvania were supposed to submit a new annual report to the state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) on December 10 detailing volatile organic compound (VOC) and methane emissions from their operations over the past one-year period. Shortly before that deadline, the DEP suspended the due date. This past weekend, the DEP published a new due date. Drillers must submit the annual report (for 2023) by June 1, 2024.
Read More “Due Date for PA DEP Report re Methane Emissions Slips 6 Months”
There are federal lands in the Marcellus/Utica. Did you know that? The Wayne National Forest (WNF) is a patchwork of public and private mineral rights that covers over a quarter million acres of Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio. For years, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) blocked new permits and drilling in WNF. During the Trump administration, the BLM began to auction off federal leases and permits (see our stories about BLM auction in WNF here). However, a federal judge blocked drilling in WNF in 2021, after Biden had seized control of the White House (see Federal Judge Blocks Permits to Drill in OH’s Wayne Natl Forest). Although drilling in WNF is blocked, the Bidenistas are considering a rule change to allow the drilling of carbon dioxide wells in national parks, including WNF.
Read More “Carbon Capture & Storage Coming to Ohio’s Wayne National Forest?”
In April 2022, MDN reported that the top brass at Kinder Morgan, the owner and operator of the Elba Island LNG export facility (also known as Southern LNG), was considering an expansion of its modestly-sized facility (see Kinder Morgan Considers Expanding Marcellus-fed Elba Island LNG). Little did we know, but KM submitted an application to federal regulators last year requesting an expansion to the facility. That request is one of the 17 such projects now on “pause” while the Bidenistas rejigger the rules they use to approve such requests.
Read More “Elba Island is One of LNG Export Projects Blocked by Biden Pause”
Last Friday, Joementia announced he is putting “a temporary pause on pending decisions of Liquefied Natural Gas exports.” The reason? The so-called “climate crisis” is “the existential threat of our time.” It’s all rubbish. The real reason is that he bowed to radical leftists in his own party. He needs them if he has a prayer of a chance of winning reelection in November (God forbid). The action supposedly affects 17 projects in the pipeline that have requested approval from the Dept. of Energy to export LNG to countries without free-trade agreements. But now, antis say Biden’s pause can potentially help them with their existing lawsuits against facilities already approved by the DOE.
Read More “Antis Use Biden’s LNG Pause to Challenge Already-Approved Projects”
This is brilliant and something EVERYONE needs to pay attention to. Closely. The Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” WV Senate Bill (SB) 358 was introduced on Jan. 12. The state runs a short, 60-day session early each year. SB 358 would end state and local enforcement of certain Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules and regulations, which is 100% legal according to the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution.
Read More “West Virginia Bill Blocks Federal EPA Power in the Mountain State”
Here we go again. Freeport LNG’s export terminal with three liquefaction “trains” shut down in June 2022 after an explosion and fire (see Explosion Rocks Freeport LNG Export Plant – Offline for 3 Weeks). What was initially thought to be a three-week outage lasted for ten months! The plant finally returned online in March of 2023 (see Freeport LNG Plant Back to Full Capacity Using 2.1 Bcf/d of NatGas). That wasn’t the only outage at the facility.
Read More “One of Three Freeport LNG Trains Offline for “About One Month””
The province of Quebec, Canada, with a huge supply of Utica Shale gas sitting beneath it, passed a new law in April 2022 — Bill 21 — outlawing all oil and natural gas production throughout the province (see Quebec Pulls Trigger & Commits Energy Suicide – Bans All O&G Prod.). It was a breathtaking grab of totalitarian power. It’s also energy suicide. Quebec said it would pay a piddly US$79.5 million to expropriate the oil and gas drilling rights of companies owning those rights in the province. A number of companies sued…
Read More “Canadian Court Blocks Part of Quebec’s Ban on O&G Drilling”
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: U.S. Oil drillers are going electric, if they can get the electricity; NATIONAL: Energy Department sets efficiency standards for gas stoves; INTERNATIONAL: Oil drops as ample supplies offset Middle East tensions; Japan worried US pause of LNG export approvals may delay new projects; Spending on natural gas to top $1 trillion over the next decade.
Read More “Other Stories of Interest: Tue, Jan 30, 2024”
Big, breathless news coming from the do-nothing Josh Shapiro gubernatorial operation last Friday. THE MAN has made an edict to those waskily Marcellus drillers: You WILL disclose the chemicals you will use to frack and drill any given well you receive a permit for. Lights! Fireworks! Loud claps of thunder (and an echo) as if GOD has spoken. It is commanded from on high. Except…Marcellus drillers *already* make those disclosures! There is no “there” there in Shapiro’s edict. He’s (sorry for laughing out loud) jumping up and down, making a spectacle of himself over nothing. Literally. He’s hoping nobody will notice that he’s just served up a cheese puff instead of a sirloin steak.
1/30/24 UPDATE: We have included a full statement issued by the Marcellus Shale Coalition. See below.
Read More “Shapiro DEP Tweaks Reg to Publish Frack Chemicals Before Drilling”
Last summer, MDN told you that the new system to assess valuations of shale wells in West Virginia had turned into a mess (see WV NatGas Property Tax Rule Still a Mess, 303 Cases Appealed). That mess has just gotten messier — what we call a hot mess. A “clerical error” by a third-party vendor in calculating the new formula for natural gas property tax valuations caused newly producing natural gas wells to be undervalued, leading to the loss of millions of dollars for the counties that see the most shale drilling.
Read More “NatGas WV Property Tax Mistake a Hot Mess – Counties Out Millions”
In December, Pennsylvania’s Independent Fiscal Office (IFO), the agency charged with providing revenue projections along with impartial and objective analysis of fiscal, economic, and budgetary issues for the citizens and legislature of Pennsylvania, provided its best guess as to how much revenue the PA impact fee (i.e., severance tax) will generate from shale wells drilled or flowing in 2023 (see PA IFO Predicts Impact Tax Revenue to Drop 38% in 2023). The IFO bases its projections on the number of wells and the assessment for each well according to how many years it has been drilled. The agency that publishes the fees to be assessed for each well is the PA Public Utility Commission (PUC). The PUC published the official list of impact fee charges for 2023 in last Saturday’s PA Bulletin.
Read More “PA PUC Publishes Fee Schedule for Marcellus Impact Fee/Tax 2023”
The Shell ethane cracker plant in Monaca, PA (Beaver County) just hit a milestone: It’s been up and running (in a manner of speaking) for one year. Except during that one year, quite a bit of the time was spent NOT running due to various technical and equipment issues. According to a review done by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “the plant’s polyethylene units — the three clusters of pipes and vessels that turn ethylene into lentil-sized plastic beads — were down as much as they were running in that first year.”
Read More “Shell PA Cracker’s First Birthday – One Unit Still Not Online”
The mayor of Chester, PA (a suburb of Philadelphia), Stefan Roots, boldly proclaimed over the weekend that an LNG export project planned for his community called Penn LNG is “dead in the water.” He bases his claim on Joe Biden’s recent declaration that all LNG export projects are “on pause” (see White House Makes it Official – Biden Declares War on LNG Exports). The radical-left Roots has been against the Penn LNG project from the beginning. No surprise there — radical is as radical does.
Read More “Chester, PA Mayor Claims PA LNG Export Project for Philly “Dead””
The Baker Hughes rig count gained another rig last week. The count went from 620 active rigs two weeks ago to 621 last week — up a single rig. It went up a single rig the week prior, too. And that’s about where we are. We have floated between 620 and 625 for all of December and January — dipping to 619 for one week during that period. It appears we’ve hit the bottom and are stable. The Marcellus/Utica remained constant last week with 42 active rigs, after PA added two rigs the week before.
Read More “Baker Hughes U.S. Rig Count Adds 1 @ 621, M-U Even @ 42”
Did you happen to watch the NFL playoff game yesterday between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens? Great game! If you watched the commercials, you would have seen a commercial (about three or four times) for the launch of the world’s largest cruise ship — Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas. The new ship, which set sail from Miami, Florida, on Jan. 27, can carry roughly 10,000 people! Some 7,600 of them are passengers, and the rest are crew. The ship, which cost $2 billion to build, has 20 decks with 40 restaurants, bars and lounges. The best part (for us) is that it’s all powered by liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Read More “World’s Largest Cruise Ship Sails from Miami – Powered by LNG”