FERC Issues Draft EIS for Cumberland Pipeline to TN Power Plant
The radicals of the odious Sierra Club and its sycophants at the Big Green-funded group Appalachian Voices are attempting to use scare tactics against the neighbors and landowners who live along the route of a 32-mile long, 30-inch wide natural gas pipeline that Kinder Morgan needs to build to feed a new gas-fired power plant near Cumberland City, Tennessee. Hyping up “blast zones” and other nonsense, the neighbors are understandably nervous. The good news is that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a draft environmental impact statement (dEIS) last week for the project, indicating the project can get built and operated safely.
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The supposedly non-partisan U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), which increasingly appears to be influenced (if not corrupted) by the Bidenistas, published a post yesterday on the agency’s daily Today in Energy website with this headline: “Coal and natural gas plants will account for 98% of U.S. capacity retirements in 2023.” The thrust of the article is that dirty fossil energy is being phased out of electricity production in favor of unreliable, intermittent so-called renewables (like solar and wind). EIA says operators plan to retire 15.6 gigawatts (GW) of electric-generating capacity in the U.S. this year, mostly natural gas-fired (6.2 GW) and coal-fired (8.9 GW) power plants. But as usual with the Biden administration, key facts are left out of the article. We have the rest of the story…
“May the odds be ever in your favor.” – Hunger Games. For more than a year, we have covered the topic of the Bidenistas’ Hunger Games contest to award $7 billion to some 6-10 “hydrogen hubs” across the country. Each winning hub will receive $500 million to $1 billion of government largesse to help build a hub in a given region. The money for the hub projects was allocated as part of the so-called Infrastructure bill, passed in November 2021 (see 
Joe Biden has big plans to force you to change the way you get (and consume) your energy. He wants you to use hydrogen, electricity (generated by unreliable renewable sources like wind and solar), force you to capture your carbon dioxide (the stuff you breathe out with every breath you take), and in general, use anything other than fossil energy. Joe is happy to export LNG (a nasty fossil fuel), but only because other people will use it and not you. There’s one big problem with making Joe’s dystopian future a reality: The government bureaucracy and red tape that it spins, is preventing his preferred sources of energy from getting built and used. Isn’t it delicious? The very bureaucracy the left loves and adores is strangling the left’s attempts at the forced conversion of society to alternative energy.
You’ve heard of investment firms like BlackRock, and Vanguard Group, and Fidelity. But have you heard of VanEck? It’s much smaller than the biggies like BlackRock, but important all the same. VanEck is a global asset manager that offers active and passive investment portfolios in hard assets, emerging markets equity and debt, precious metals, fixed income, and other alternative asset classes. The CEO of the company, Jan van Eck, recently published a provocative post on the company’s website called, “ESG Died in 2022.” He takes on the issue of big investors (like BlackRock) throwing their weight around with proxy voting–a default way of running a company, making it bow to your whims.
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On Dec. 22, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) published a Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement that allows the nearly-completed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) to finish up construction through 3.5 miles of Jefferson National Forest straddling West Virginia and Virginia (see 
Baker Hughes reported the rig count for last week saw the deepest cuts in rigs for any single week since June 2020 (just as the COVID pandemic and lockdowns were taking hold). The oil and gas rig count, an early indicator of future output, fell by 12 to 759 in the week ending Feb. 3. That is the lowest overall rig count number since September of last year. All of which sounds rather ominous. So we grabbed the numbers and updated our own spreadsheet/chart, and found the rig count across the three Marcellus/Utica states–Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia–remained a constant 52 active rigs over the past three months. Whew.
New analysis from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows the world will bring online the least amount of new LNG exports this year than it has in the past ten years. The world will, if the predicted four new projects come online, add another 1 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day) of LNG export capacity, which is piddly. But that’s not even the worst news. The worst news is that NONE of that new capacity will come from the U.S.
Last week, the oil and gas industry gathered in Houston for the 
Sigh. The Bidenistas are at it again–targeting the fossil fuel industry for extinction. The latest attempt came on January 9th when the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which serves as the White House’s environmental policy arm, issued “interim guidance” to assist federal agencies in analyzing so-called greenhouse gas (GHG) and climate change effects of their proposed actions under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). One of the agencies affected by this guidance is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). However, FERC is an independent agency and does not necessarily march to the White House drummer. The question is, how much will the new CEQ guidance affect FERC’s policies as the agency evaluates oil and gas pipelines?
For almost a year, we’ve sounded the alarm about a coming change at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that will force publicly traded companies to disclose mythical greenhouse gas emissions data (see 