Shell Officially Launches Pa. Cracker Plant Using M-U Ethane
It’s been a looooong time coming. We’ve waited for this day for more than ten years. In March 2012, MDN told you that Shell had announced selecting a site in Pennsylvania as the future location for an ethane cracker plant (see Shell Announces Location of Ethane Cracker Plant). Ethane crackers use ethane (doh!) as their feedstock to “crack” the ethane and create plastic pellets that are then used by manufacturers to make pretty much everything you touch and use every day. Ethane is one of the NGLs (natural gas liquids) that comes out of the ground along with natural gas (methane) and other NGLs like propane and butane. We have huge amounts of ethane in the Marcellus/Utica. New markets, like the Shell cracker, equal bigger profits for M-U drillers.
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Equitrans Midstream (formerly EQT Midstream) owns the Rager Mountain Gas Storage Area in Jackson Township, Cambria County, in Pennsylvania. Since Nov. 6th, one of the wells at the Rager Mountain area (a depleted conventional well drilled in 1965) has been leaking methane. Residents living in the area were first alerted to the leak by a very loud hissing or roaring sound, and the odor of natural gas. The smell (hydrogen sulfide) persists. Equitrans is trying to fix the leak and is making progress, but gas continues to escape between two of the well’s casings.
In 2020, EOG Resources, one of the largest oil and gas drillers in the U.S. (with international operations in Trinidad and China), sold *all* of its Marcellus assets, which were located in Bradford County, PA, to Tilden Resources for $130 million (see 
As we pointed out about a month ago, following his sellout of the country by voting for Joe Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act (a new name for the Build Back Better/New Green Deal), U.S. Senator Joe Manchin’s popularity in his home state of West Virginia sank into the sewer (see 
So much for the “peak gas” theorists out there who predict we’ve finally hit the top of natural gas usage in this country. It isn’t happening. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says, after analyzing its mountains of data, that the U.S. *increased* its usage of natural gas for all purposes, including exports, by 3.6% last year. We’re abundantly certain this year will show a similar increase.
It seems Africans have had about enough of the self-righteous preaching from the likes of radical leftist groups like Extinction Rebellion, a group that wants to deny African countries the right to extract and use their own abundant fossil energy supplies (in particular, natural gas). The African Energy Chamber (AEC), along with the president of the African Development Bank, pushed back against the “colonizers” who want to deny Africa the right to use its own resources. The right of African countries to extract and use natural gas has become a flashpoint issue at the UN’s 2022 Climate Change Conference (COP 27), which is happening right now in Egypt.
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Sempra Infra. and Williams announce projects for LNG, gas, pipes; Some Wisconsin frac sand mines see growing demand from oil, natgas; NATIONAL: Race is on to be next big USA supplier of LNG to Europe; Hydrogen-powered locomotives?; INTERNATIONAL: First German port for natural gas imports to go into operation; Spot LNG prices defy history and fall as demand rises.
John Deskins, director of the Bureau of Business & Economic Research at West Virginia University, told members of the state legislature’s Joint Committee on Natural Gas Development at a meeting on Monday that the severance tax on natural gas production in the state is responsible for more than 20% of the state’s record-breaking tax revenue surpluses. Natural gas severance tax collections between July and October accounted for approximately 20% of the $575 million in total general revenue fund surplus tax revenue during that time period.
The Freeport LNG export facility, located in Quintana Island, Texas (near Houston), experienced an explosion and fire in early June (see 
The Bidenistas waited until the UN’s 2022 Climate Change Conference, called COP 27, was up and running (in Egypt) before *going to Egypt* to announce their latest attack on the oil and natural gas industry. At COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced it is “strengthening its proposed standards to cut methane and other harmful air pollution” in the oil and gas industry. In other words, yet another massive power grab in attempting to regulate oil and gas at the federal level, instead allowing O&G to be regulated at the Constitutionally-designated state level.
Last year the Bidenistas initiated a massive power grab to transfer the right of individual states to regulate local natural gas gathering pipelines to the federal government (see 
The left, and many on the right, are banking on hydrogen to be the next BIG THING in energy. Hydrogen fuel cell cars and burning hydrogen to heat your home are just two huge applications people dream will come true in the next 20 years. Of course, they’ve been dreaming about hydrogen for more than 50 years, but the history of hydrogen is for another post. We pay attention to hydrogen because 95% of all hydrogen today is produced by steam cracking natural gas. Ergo, hydrogen has the potential to be a big, important, new customer for our molecules. Everyone and his brother is making predictions about the market for hydrogen over the next 30 years. Norwegian company DNV has its own prediction, the “Hydrogen Forecast to 2050.”