Analysts Say New FERC Chair a Consensus Builder, Won’t Attack Pipes
As we told you last week, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has a new “acting” Chairman, Willie Phillips (see Willie Phillips Takes Over as Acting FERC Chairman, Dick Glick Gone). Phillips, a lawyer, is a D.C. apparatchik–growing up and getting his college education in the D.C. swamp. Prior to joining FERC in November 2021, Phillips was chairman of the Public Service Commission for the District of Columbia. Those who watch FERC and its commissioners say Phillips is not nearly as caustic and confrontational as Glick was–that he is more of a consensus builder.
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MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Coterra Energy has strong FCF generation and LNG opportunity; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Louisiana, Texas to gain thousands of energy jobs at start of 2023; NATIONAL: Shale worker pay growth slows; Oil posts steep weekly loss amid demand uncertainty; Wood Mackenzie: 2023 could be CCUS breakout year; 2022 saw the second highest oil production in U.S. history.
A group of landowners in Harrison and Doddridge counties (in West Virginia) sued Antero Resources, claiming the company had deducted post-production costs from royalties not allowed under the leases they had signed. Last year, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia ruled mostly in favor of the landowners. Antero appealed the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (4th Circuit). Yesterday, the judges of the 4th Circuit issued their ruling (full copy below). Nobody got everything they wanted–we’d call it a split decision. However, Antero did win the right to make deductions in certain circumstances.
Antero Midstream hired Veolia Water Technologies to build and operate a state-of-the-art frack wastewater recycling facility in Doddridge County, WV, which began operations in 2017 (see 
The “front month” (Feb. 2023) NYMEX Henry Hub price for natural gas took another nosedive yesterday, hitting its lowest price ($3.72/MMBtu) since Jan. 4, 2022. Why the drop? Weather, or course. But also expectations. Natural gas commodities trading is a strange art. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported yesterday that withdrawal from underground gas inventories was 221 billion cubic feet (Bcf) over the past week. The five-year average for the same period is 98 Bcf. Holy smokes! That’s a HUGE drawdown. And yet the market went the other way and crashed the price–because traders expected the drawdown to be even bigger–around 240 Bcf.
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. In December 2021, MDN told you that TVA is spending over $1 billion to replace six coal-fired plants with natgas-fired turbines (see 
Most of the public and many of the private companies that drill in the Marcellus and Utica for natural gas either already have been, or are pursuing, certification of their operations as being “responsible.” Three primary standards authorities currently exist–MiQ, Project Canary, and Equitable Origin–to certify that a company’s natural gas was extracted and pipelined with low methane emissions. There’s even a fourth certification scheme underway by Williams, Coterra Energy, and Dominion Energy (see 
We’re catching up the permit report for the past two weeks (since we were off all of last week). Permits issued for Dec. 19 through Jan. 1 in the Marcellus/Utica included 19 new permits in Pennsylvania, 7 new permits in Ohio, and 12 new permits in West Virginia.
Last September, EQT Corporation announced it is buying privately-owned Tug Hill Operating’s West Virginia shale assets for $5.2 billion (see 
Yesterday MDN brought you the news that the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) held a hearing in December to explain new regulations coming from the PUC, based on directives from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), to begin regulating previously unregulated natural gas gathering pipelines (see 
Why would a major oil and gas driller decide to cede control of the future of its company to a group of international leftists hellbent on destroying fossil energy? The answer eludes us, but it has just happened with a second Marcellus/Utica driller: EOG Resources. Yesterday, EOG announced it has joined the UN’s Oil & Gas Methane Partnership 2.0 (OGMP 2.0). Support for OGMP 2.0 is growing in the natgas marketplace in the U.S. We previously told you that Cheniere Energy’s LNG export plants are seeking certification under OGMP 2.0 (see 
S&P Global Commodity Insights published an analysis article speculating on the overall level of natural gas production we can expect to see in the U.S. in 2023. According to S&P’s analysts, weaker prices for the NYMEX Henry Hub futures price expected this year, along with recent weakness in the internal rate of return (IRR) for companies, are combining to lower the amount of growth in natgas production we might otherwise have experienced. S&P isn’t saying we’ll go backward–with less production. It’s saying production won’t grow as much as it could have if not for these negative factors.