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Dear President Biden: It’s Time to Allow More Pipelines from M-U
The heads of three major oil and gas groups in the Appalachian region–the Marcellus Shale Coalition (representing Pennsylvania), the Gas and Oil Association of West Virginia, and the Ohio Oil and Gas Association–combined to pen an open letter to President Biden encouraging him to let the Marcellus/Utica “lead the way” in achieving our country’s shared goals for domestic, affordable, and clean energy. It’s a great letter making strong and cogent arguments for why more M-U natgas can reduce emissions and benefit not only the economy but the environment. There’s just one small problem…
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We spotted a fascinating story out of Los Angeles about the city’s foolish and reckless action in abandoning its largest natural gas-fired power generation plant in favor of using hydrogen instead. Hydrogen is the Holy Grail for the left. At least, for some on the left. Many on the left (and, it seems, on the right too) want to replace natural gas with 100% hydrogen in gas-fired power plants because natgas produces carbon dioxide when it burns, and hydrogen does not. Except (we learned from this article), hydrogen power generation has one huge, glaring, problem…
NATIONAL: The clear and present danger in the electric transition; INTERNATIONAL: With years of high prices ahead, LNG buyers covet long-term deals; Will Asia start pulling large volumes of LNG away from Europe?
Once a month, the analysts at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) issue the agency’s Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), their best guess about where energy prices and production will go in the next 12 months or so. We sometimes poke good-natured fun at the EIA because one month, their predictions go up, the next month, down, etc. What about the latest STEO dart board, published yesterday? EIA slashed the price of natural gas at the Henry Hub another 30% from the previous monthly STEO, saying natgas will average $3.40/MMBut in 2023, down from a forecast of $4.90 the month before. EIA’s new average price, if it holds, would be 50% lower than 2022’s average of $6.42/MMBtu.
Tuesday of last week, Freeport LNG, which has been out of operation since an explosion and fire in June 2022, asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for permission to begin re-introducing feedgas back into one of three liquefaction “trains” (units) at the facility. A day later, FERC agreed, and small amounts of gas began to flow (see 
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.
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.