Is “Next Generation Natural Gas” Just Virtue Signaling?
We’re sure this post will not make some of our industry readers/friends happy. But we think it’s time to rip the scab off the festering ESG/Next Generation/Responsible Gas wound and expose it. As Joan Rivers used to say, Can we talk? What got us thinking about responsible gas certification was an announcement from Virginia Natural Gas that the company has entered into a deal with BP to buy “Next Generation Natural Gas” for resale to its customers. VNG will buy it from wells in the Louisiana Haynesville Shale. We asked ourselves these questions: What’s the likelihood that molecules of so-called responsible gas from Louisiana will actually travel all the way to Virginia? And if they do, what happens to those molecules once there?
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We spotted an article about the left’s war on fossil energy, and how that war is causing economic chaos around the world. We disagree 100% with the premise of the article, which begins this way: “Climate change is a real and urgent problem. More than a century of carbon emissions is warming the planet and causing floods, droughts, fires and other cataclysmic events that are killing people, threatening livelihoods and upending economies.” However, the author goes on to say that the war on fossil fuels (which are, according to the author, the source of carbon emissions) is causing its own form of chaos. He makes some great points about the chaos that comes from not having a good transition plan in place to get us from fossil energy to so-called renewables.
In October, MDN brought you the news that the company created and backed by Dan Rice (and his brothers), called Archaea Energy, is selling itself to BP for $4.1 billion (see 
INTERNATIONAL: European gas consumption is 24% below the five-year average.
In September, EQT Corporation announced it is buying Tug Hill Operating’s West Virginia shale assets for $5.2 billion (see Confirmed: 
This morning the Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office (IFO) released its latest quarterly Natural Gas Production Report for July through September 2022 (full copy below). There were 158 new horizontal wells spud (drilled) in 3Q22, an increase of 47 wells (+42%) compared to 3Q21. However, natural gas production volume was 1,878 billion cubic feet (Bcf) in 3Q22, a slight decrease (-0.8%) from 3Q21. It is the third quarterly decrease in production in a row (comparing the same quarters year-over-year). However, 3Q22 production was up slightly (+1.4%) from 2Q22.
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 
Three weeks ago, Freeport LNG, which has been out of commission since early June, changed the target date it would restart from November to mid-December (see 
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 
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.