Other Stories of Interest: Thu, Jun 8, 2023
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: WV governor announces company to turn plastics into hydrogen; Cindy Adams Dunn confirmed to serve as Secretary DCNR; Senate Republicans pass bill taking ‘Protection’ out of DEP name; NATIONAL: Biden admin is preparing to target Americans’ gas furnaces amid stove crackdown; Williams to complete two US natgas pipe projects on time in Q4 2024; Slow pace of US gas infrastructure buildout is ‘recipe for disaster’; House panel investigates ties between Interior secretary, antis; INTERNATIONAL: Exxon CEO tells Europe to follow USA approach to climate action.
Read More “Other Stories of Interest: Thu, Jun 8, 2023”
In March, environmental radical Pat McDonnell of PennFuture, the former Pennsylvania Secretary of the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), along with his best friend THE Delaware Riverkeeper, Maya van Rossum, sued McDonnell’s former agency over permits the DEP issued to Williams to build the Regional Energy Access Expansion (REAE) project (see 
With a one-vote majority in the Pennsylvania House, the Democrats who run the House are stepping up their attacks on the oil and gas industry in the state. The latest attack is House Bill (HB) 652, which is aimed at blocking new permits to build or expand various projects–including gas-fired power plants and wastewater injection wells–in so-called environmental justice areas. The left defines environmental justice as any area with a certain percentage of blacks and Latinos, or an area with a lot of poor people (i.e., rural). So, environmental justice areas are pretty much anyplace in the entire state–because every location is either urban (with minorities) or rural (with poor folk). Heads I win, tails you lose.
Competitive Power Ventures (CPV) currently operates a gas-fired power plant in the Keasbey section of Woodbridge, NJ. The plant currently generates power for about 700,000 homes. In 2018, CPV proposed adding a second power plant at the same location (see 
It’s possible to track which institutional investors (big investors like BlackRock) are buying or selling shares in various companies by reviewing Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Form 13F filings. S&P Global Market Intelligence performed a 13F review of which companies bought, and which sold (and how much) shares of stocks for shale gas drillers during the first quarter of 2023. The topmost active shale gas driller having its stock purchased by institutional investors was Comstock Resources, which drills exclusively in the Haynesville Shale. The reason Comstock came out on top, postulates S&P, is because the Haynesville is located close to the Gulf Coast and LNG export plants. However, it was the rest of the list that interested us.
Canadian-based Enbridge operates, among many other assets, the Dawn Hub in the Canadian province of Ontario. Located in southwestern Ontario, Dawn, with 288 Bcf (billion cubic feet) of gas storage, provides shippers with direct access to North America’s major supply basins–including the Utica and the Marcellus. The Dawn Hub is connected to a myriad of pipelines, including Rover and NEXUS (from the M-U region). The new news is that Enbridge has just launched an open season to expand capacity along the pipeline that runs from Dawn to both the Kirkwall and Parkway hubs near Toronto.
An advisory note from Citi analyst Paul Diamond, picked up by the Seeking Alpha investor website, says U.S. natural gas producers are “primed for a wave of consolidation” in the medium term. Near the top of the list of potential takeover targets is, according to Diamond, Southwestern Energy, which had concentrated mainly on the Marcellus/Utica region until 2021, when it went wandering into Haynesville drilling. Who might be interested in buying Southwestern?
Last week shale drillers could, for the first time, begin to apply for permits to drill under (not on top of) Ohio state lands and state parks under newly formulated rules established by the Ohio Oil & Gas Land Management (OGLM) Commission (see 
In March, MDN brought you the news that New Fortress Energy (NFE) confirmed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it plans to apply for updated permits to build an LNG export plant in landlocked northeastern Pennsylvania (see 
Last December, Rice Acquisition Corp II, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) started by the Rice brothers (Danny, Toby, and Derek), announced a deal to acquire NET Power–an electric power developer with revolutionary new technology to capture every last molecule of carbon dioxide from natural gas-fired power plants (see 
There is no doubt that LNG (liquefied natural gas) exports are a key and increasingly critical customer for our domestic natural gas–including gas produced in the Marcellus/Utica. The evil (and clever) minds of anti-fossil fuel zealots are always thinking up new ways to block domestic oil and gas production. Their latest strategy is to pressure (i.e., bully) Big Insurance companies into dropping insurance policies for LNG export plants. If the plants can’t get insurance to protect them against potential disasters, they can’t operate.