TVA Recommends Replacing Cumberland Coal Plant w/Natural Gas
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally-owned electric utility corporation in the U.S. TVA’s service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. TVA is the sixth-largest power supplier and the largest public utility in the country. One year ago, MDN told you that TVA is spending over $1 billion to replace six coal-fired plants with natgas-fired turbines (see TVA Investing $1B to Build New Natgas-Fired Electric Plants). Good news! On Friday, TVA recommended moving forward with replacing one of the six–a coal-fired plant located near Cumberland City, Tennessee–with a natural gas combined-cycle power plant. TVA wisely selected natural gas over unreliable, intermittent (and very expensive) solar power.
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Just last week, we told you that a West Virginia Circuit Court judge who allegedly waved and pointed a gun at an attorney for EQT Corporation during a hearing about a case brought against EQT by landowners for improper deductions of post-production expenses from their royalty payments had resigned (see 
NATIONAL: API rips Biden’s energy policy, warns of ‘major’ crisis in next few weeks; USA oil and gas jobs are still in short supply; INTERNATIONAL: OPEC slashes oil output by most since 2020.
This one came right out of left field, and we didn’t see it coming. Totally unexpected. Yesterday, outgoing U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, from Pennsylvania, introduced a bill to reform pipeline permitting. The bill specifically approves and would push through final construction for Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a pipeline that doesn’t even touch PA (it starts in Wetzel County, WV, and ends in Pittsylvania County, VA). The bill was concurrently introduced in the House by Congressman Mike Kelly, also from PA. Weird. Does this bill stand even a remote chance of passing before Congress adjourns and the next Congress takes over in early January?
A group of 40 so-called environmental groups (all of them leftist radicals) is doing its best to defeat the 94% completed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) project. The groups sent a letter yesterday to officials at the U.S. Dept. of Interior, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), asking those agencies to stretch out the process of granting new permits (for the THIRD time) to complete MVP by as long as possible. The radicals want a 30-day public scoping period, for starters, so they can repeat their lies once again. They’ve already had their say multiple times for many months–they don’t need another 30-day slot now.
This is getting serious–for woke investment firm BlackRock, a company that demands companies avoid using fossil energy in order to combat global warming. BIG states controlled by Republicans have had enough of BlackRock’s anti-fossil energy activism and are fighting back. In August, Texas, the second largest state (by population) in the country, announced the state’s public pension funds and government agencies are divesting from BlackRock and nine other companies (see 
Updates for Pennsylvania’s conventional oil and gas drillers, both environmental protection standards and waste handling standards (two different updates), will now fall to the incoming Josh Shapiro administration. So says the Acting Secretary of the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), Kurt Klapkowski. In other words, Klapkowski and his boss, Gov. Tom Wolf, are punting these important updates to the anti-drilling Shapiro. Washing their hands of it.
Three weeks ago, one of the ten natural gas storage wells at the Equitrans Rager Mountain Gas Storage Area in Jackson Township, Cambria County (in Pennsylvania) began to leak and ended up leaking roughly 100 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of gas into the atmosphere (see 
In early 2015, MDN told you the then-Obama administration’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) did a disservice to not only the drilling industry, but the wind industry, farmers, and the construction industry, when it listed the northern long-eared bat as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act (see 
Last week (Nov. 21-27) the number of permits issued to drill new shale wells slumped to 17 from the prior week’s 26. In Pennsylvania, 12 permits were issued, eight to Seneca Resources (one pad) in Cameron County, and four to Chesapeake Energy (one pad) in Bradford County. In Ohio, four permits were issued to Encino Energy, one in Carroll County and three (one pad) in Harrison County. And West Virginia at least received a single new permit, for Antero Resources in Doddridge County, after getting skunked the previous week.
Yesterday the Pennsylvania Environmental Quality Board (EQB), a part of the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection, voted to adopt a last-minute, rushed-through-in-a-hurry regulation to control volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions (and by extension, methane emissions) from conventional oil and gas operations in the state. The DEP and EQB had more than five years to work on these regulations and chose to fritter away the time. Faced with losing federal highway budget money without a new regulation in place, they rushed it–and botched it. Now the mom-and-pop oil and gas companies across the state will pay the price (and some will go out of business).
In February, MDN brought you news about a “last mile” pipeline from Dominion Energy (see 
Diversified Energy (formerly Diversified Gas & Oil), with major assets in the Marcellus/Utica region (other regions too), owns approximately 8 million acres of leases with close to 70,000 (mostly) conventional oil and gas wells. Diversified has aggressively moved to control methane emissions from its operations over the past year (see