Study: LNG Exports Do NOT Lead to Increased Domestic Energy Costs
In January, Joe Biden announced a “pause” for any approvals of new LNG export plants (currently 17 requests in the pipeline) for at least one year (see White House Makes it Official – Biden Declares War on LNG Exports). One of the reasons cited for the pause is the oft-repeated lie that exporting LNG causes the price for natural gas here at home (for both residential and commercial) to skyrocket. A new report published by the Texas Oil & Gas Association refutes that claim using energy data from the federal government itself.
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Mountain V Oil & Gas, headquartered in Buckhannon, WV, is a privately owned independent energy company with both conventional and shale assets in the Appalachian Basin. The company acquires and drills wells on over 300,000 leased acres, mainly focused on gas wells. Mountain V is now expanding its focus to include oil. Last fall, the company signed an agreement to buy the oil and gas assets of AXP Energy — assets located in Tennessee, Eastern Kentucky, Virginia, and the Illinois Basins — for $4 million. The AXP purchase with its oil-heavy assets closed earlier today.
A royalty case that took nearly four years and hundreds of filings by both sides was finally decided by an Ohio jury in March (see 
SLB (formerly Schlumberger) is the largest oilfield services (drilling and fracking) company in the world. It does a lot of work in the Marcellus/Utica. SLB announced yesterday a deal to buy a smaller rival, ChampionX, in an all-stock deal valued at $7.75 billion. ChampionX specializes in chemistry solutions (fracking fluids), artificial lift systems, and equipment and technologies that help companies drill for and produce oil and gas. Little did we know until we checked, but ChampionX has a major presence in the Marcellus/Utica region via supply chain vendors who sell its products and services. So this combination, which has national and international implications, also has the power to affect drilling and fracking here in the M-U.
In January, we told you the State of Maine was actively considering a new law, L.D. 2077, that would prohibit natural gas companies from charging ratepayers for the construction and expansion of gas service mains and gas service lines beginning Feb. 1, 2025 (see 
MDN is not a stock-picking service, but we spotted an interesting article appearing on the Seeking Alpha investor’s website about where to invest now so that when the price of natural gas eventually rebounds (and with it, lifts the stock price of gas producers), investors can make money. The investor/writer, who is a nuclear power engineer by training, proposes the theory that investing in the Marcellus/Utica is a better choice than investing in other gas plays because (a) our drillers have lower breakeven costs and (b) some of our drillers also produce NGLs, which fetch more money than methane.
Natural gas is, as we have often pointed out, one of the purest commodity markets in existence. The classic supply/demand curve is at work. If there’s more supply than demand, prices for gas move down. And conversely, if there’s more demand than supply, prices move higher. We have been stuck in a sucky price pattern this year, not helped by a very moderate winter. The phrase on the lips of every landowner and driller is, When will the price move higher? According to analysts from Morgan Stanley, not anytime soon.
The Ohio Oil & Gas Association (OOGA) held its annual meeting in March at the Hilton in Columbus, OH. While MDN was not there, an industry friend sent along a copy of the slide deck used by the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) Division of Oil & Gas Resources Management. The ODNR’s “regulatory update” addressed a number of interesting issues, including the state’s ongoing application for “primacy” in permitting carbon dioxide injection wells, permitting and unitization (forced pooling), updates on rule changes for drilling and fracking, and several “top 5” lists for natural gas and oil producers in the Utica Shale.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro traveled to Scranton, PA, in mid-March to announce a proposal to “immediately pull Pennsylvania out of a multi-state carbon cap-and-trade program” (the so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI) and instead enroll PA in its very own RGGI-like carbon tax program (see 
We continue to be impressed with Shell’s still relatively new CEO, Wael Sawan, who took over the CEO role last June. At an investor meeting last June, Sawan unveiled a new strategic direction for the company — back to more drilling for oil and gas and less dithering with renewables (see 
Back on Jan. 3, we brought you the news (from Reuters) that the U.S. became the #1 exporter of LNG in the world in 2023 (see 
It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while, academic researchers do real, actual, in-the-field research, as opposed to running computer simulations. Such an act of real research was just published in the journal Science last Thursday. A research group led by Carbon Mapper, with researchers from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Arizona State University, University of Arizona, Scientific Aviation, and the Environmental Protection Agency used advanced aircraft to conduct the largest direct measurement-based survey of active municipal solid waste landfills to date from 2018 through 2022, looking for fugitive methane emissions. They found that 52% of surveyed landfills had “observable point source emissions” (i.e, they are super-emitters), as compared with a 0.2% to 1% detection rate observed for super-emitters from surveyed oil and gas infrastructure in California and the Permian Basin.