Bidenistas Unleash Hellscape of U.S. Methane Regs at COP28
EPA Administrator Michael Regan used a considerable amount of fossil energy and emitted billows of carbon dioxide to jet over to Dubai to participate in the COP28 confab. On Friday, Regan released his agency’s latest attempt to illegally regulate the oil and gas industry (something Constitutionally left to the individual states to regulate). Regan released a final rule that was “two years in the making” to force the U.S. oil and gas industry to cut methane emissions by using budget-busting new technologies and onerous (frequent) inspections. A long-time energy attorney says the new regulations are likely to be challenged in court.
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Crescent Petroleum is based in the United Arab Emirates. Crescent’s CEO, Majid Jafar (who is attending the UN COP28 event), spoke to a CNBC reporter yesterday. Jafar *unloaded* on anti-fossil fuel U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. Among some of Jafar’s choice comments: “Blaming the producers of oil and gas for climate change is like blaming farmers for obesity. It’s our societal consumption that is the issue.” He also said if Guterres is serious about ending fossil energy, perhaps he should have traveled to the COP28 meeting in a wooden boat powered with sails and oars. Boom!
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The Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) released production numbers for the third quarter of 2023 late last week, and nobody noticed…except MDN (thanks to a tip from a good friend). ODNR no longer issues a press release to summarize the results as they once did. We’ve got the full spreadsheet with oil and gas production details for all 3,281 active shale wells in the Buckeye State. We’ve sliced and diced the numbers and have our usual Top 25 lists for natural gas and oil wells. We’ve included a couple of charts summarizing the data, showing the total production by driller (gas and oil) and the total production for the quarter by county. You’re gonna love it!
Chesapeake Energy is a stellar turnaround story. Years of mountainous debt pushed the company into bankruptcy in June 2020 (see 
Yet another top-notch speaker at Hart Energy’s DUG Appalachia event in Pittsburgh was leading energy trader Dennis Kissler from BOK Financial. During his talk, Kissler said, “New England has dodged a bullet because they’ve actually seen mild winter followed by mild summer and a mild winter to the start of this year.” And, says Kissler, if we get a cold snap, New England is in for a nasty surprise: brownouts. “They’re going to realize they’re going to need another source of power.” And that source of power is natural gas.
Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line (Transco) is a natural gas pipeline that initially brought gas from the Gulf Coast of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania to deliver gas to the New Jersey and New York City area. It is owned and operated by Williams. With the advent of the shale revolution, Transco was converted to be bidirectional, flowing Marcellus/Utica gas south to as far as Texas. Transco now transports approximately 15% of the nation’s natural gas! It is a massive and vital pipeline. With the imminent start of the Mountain Valley Pipeline and an extra 2 Bcf/d flowing from the Marcellus to Transco’s Station 165 in Pittsylvania County, VA, how will Transco handle the extra volumes?
Blue Racer Midstream is a small natural gas midstream company that provides natural gas gathering and processing, mixed NGL fractionation and condensate stabilization, and NGL marketing and transportation to producers operating in the Marcellus/Utica in southeastern Ohio and the panhandle of West Virginia. We don’t talk about the company much because it’s privately held and not in the news often. Blue Racer is in the news today! Fitch Ratings, one of the big three ratings agencies, announced it will no longer include Blue Racer in its debt ratings system after December 29th because (our words, Fitch’s sentiment) the company is too small to bother spending time to analyze.
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Although we should have expected this, the news that Equitrans Midstream, builder of the 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) project, is looking at possibly selling itself comes as a gut punch. We suppose it hits us that way because we feel as though we’ve been in the trenches with Equitrans from the beginning, fighting to get MVP completed. Equitrans was birthed just five years ago. As the company closes in on finishing and launching MVP, and as its CEO (since it was founded) is about to retire at the end of the year (see 
Anti-fossil fuel fanatics in Ohio (and beyond) still can’t accept that they lost a battle to block drilling under (not on) Ohio state-owned land, including some Ohio state parks. Several weeks ago, the Ohio Oil & Gas Land Management Commission (OGLMC) met in a public forum and voted to allow shale drilling under three state-owned tracts of land: (1) all 20,000 acres of Salt Fork State Park in Guernsey County, (2) more than 300 acres of Valley Run Wildlife Area in Carroll County, and (3) 66 acres of the Zepernick Wildlife Area in Columbiana County (see 
In March 2022, MDN brought you news of a bold new plan by EQT CEO Toby Rice to “unleash” American LNG exports to not only help our friends in Europe but also to reduce the amount of coal use across the world, thereby lowering coal-related emissions including carbon dioxide (see 
Columbiana County, OH, located in the northern portion of the Utica Shale play in the Buckeye State, has recently come roaring back to life. In 2022, there were 41 permits issued to drill in the Utica in Columbiana County. So far, in 2023, there have been 35 permits issued to drill in Columbiana County. But here’s the thing: 16 of this year’s 35 permits (half!) were issued in November! It’s like Columbiana had been asleep for most of this year, and then it suddenly came alive.
In November 2021, Northeast Natural Energy (NNE), a West Virginia driller, announced all of its gas produced in West Virginia had achieved Equitable Origin’s EO100™ Standard for Responsible Energy Development (see 
Hope Gas provides natural gas service to approximately 131,000 residential, industrial, and commercial customers in thirty-five West Virginia counties. In October, Hope closed on the acquisition of the West Virginia division of Peoples Gas for an undisclosed amount, giving the company another 13,000 customers (see