Boston Imports 10th Foreign LNG Cargo This Year – It’s Only August!
For more than four years, we have been calling attention to the fact that the Boston/New England area imports FOREIGN LNG each year, even though abundant DOMESTIC supplies sit a few hundred miles away in the Pennsylvania Marcellus (see Confirmed: LNG Coming to Boston on Jan 22 is Illegal Russian Gas). New England pays 2-4X as much for their imported natural gas as they would from the Marcellus/Utica. What stops Boston from using domestic supplies? Politicians (the governors) in both New York and Massachusetts block new pipelines. So far this year, Boston has imported ten cargoes of LNG at two facilities near Boston–roughly 16 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of natgas. All of it is from foreign sources.
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In September 2021, the Weirton (WV) Zoning Board of Appeals rejected a request by Southwestern Energy to build a well pad inside city limits (see 
A futures contract is a legal agreement to buy or sell a particular commodity asset (like natural gas) at a predetermined price at a specified time in the future. The Henry Hub Natural Gas futures contract (NG) on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) is widely used as the national benchmark price for natural gas. The Henry Hub (HH) is located in southern Louisiana where 16 interstate natural gas pipeline systems converge. But just about any trading hub along natgas pipelines can have a futures contract associated with it. For example, the Eastern Gas South hub in southwestern Pennsylvania (which used to be called Dominion South) has monthly futures contracts extending out for years. Eastern Gas South and other M-U hubs are seeing the price for futures contracts drop like a rock compared to HH. Why? Lack of takeaway pipeline capacity.
In June, seemingly out of nowhere, a plan to build an LNG export facility on the banks of the Delaware River south of Philadelphia made big headlines in Philly. Penn LNG, headed by Franc James, a native of Philadelphia, has “quietly lined up support to build a $6.4 billion liquefied natural gas export terminal near Philly.” While acknowledging such a project will face stiff opposition, James is planning to pre-file with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) by the end of this year, and reach a final investment decision (FID) by 2024. Full speed ahead!
We experienced déjà vu as we read about a hearing held Tuesday evening in Plum Boro (Allegheny County, PA) about a proposed shale wastewater injection well. Some 20 people made their way to the microphones to voice their objections to plans by Penneco Environmental Solutions to site a second injection well in the boro–right next to an existing injection well. We’ve heard it all before, almost four years ago, when some of the same people objected to Penneco’s plans to install the first injection well (see 
Drillers (exploration and production companies, or E&Ps) were thrilled with record-high earnings and cash flow in the second quarter of this year. Soaring commodity prices and “strict financial discipline” on the part of oil and gas drillers resulted in pre-tax operating earnings and cash flows surging by 29% and 22%, respectively, from 1Q22. And 1Q22 was up too! So what did drillers, especially drillers in the Marcellus/Utica, do with all that extra cash? Did they pay down debt? Buy back shares of company stock? Issue higher dividends? Something else?
Get a Democrat nurse to repeat the talking points from two far-left, lying Democrat groups (the Conservation Voters of PA and the NRDC) bashing the Republican candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, in a TV commercial, and it’s just another regurgitate-the-lies story from lamestream media. This time the lies are that Doug Mastriano loves to pollute–because he stands up for the Marcellus shale industry in the state. We hope PA residents (and U.S. residents across the country) are beginning to see through the lies spread by the Democrat left. The left can’t argue and debate the facts, so they resort to name-calling and lies. The good news is that the left is spending money on this kind of thing, meaning they don’t believe that hardened anti-driller Josh Shapiro (Democrat, currently Attorney General) has the race for governor locked up–as all the “polls” quoted by lamestream media indicate.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Field research confirms natural gas developed safely; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Tulane prof sees bright future for natgas, renewables, but not for oil; NATIONAL: EIA expects U.S. ethane production to grow in second half of 2022; Jim Cramer says he likes these 5 LNG stocks for the long haul; As natural gas prices jump, shale oil firms get gassy; INTERNATIONAL: Full gas storage no fix for Europe’s winter energy crunch; Germany’s energy crisis dispels several myths.
In May 2021, the radicals from PennFuture, the Philadelphia-based Clean Air Council, and the so-called Center for Biological Diversity (better named the Center for Leftwing Conformity) challenged an air permit issued by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) for the Renovo Energy Center, a Marcellus-fired power plant in Clinton County (northcentral), PA (see 
Cheniere Energy operates the largest LNG export facility in the U.S.–the Sabine Pass LNG facility in the Lake Charles, LA area. Sabine Pass liquefies and exports 30 mtpa (million tonnes per year) of LNG. If new plans unveiled by Cheniere play out, the company’s second LNG export facility in Corpus Christi, TX, will come close to the output at Sabine Pass–around 28 mtpa. Both facilities have the capability of exporting Marcellus/Utica molecules.
After the shocking news that U.S. Senator Joe Manchin had sold out his state and the entire country by agreeing to support the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) bill, the details began to come out about just how bad this bill really is for the oil and gas industry. First and foremost, it slaps a new tax on oil and gas activities (see 
From time to time, we write about propane–the “other” NGL produced in the Marcellus/Utica “wet gas” region. When M-U drillers sink a well, methane is the number one hydrocarbon that comes out of the hole. But in certain areas in southwestern PA, eastern OH, and the northern panhandle of WV, other hydrocarbons come out of the hole along with methane. Being heavier than methane, they are referred to as natural gas liquids (NGLs). The primary NGL produced in the M-U region is ethane. Ergo Shell has built a $6 billion-plus cracker plant to leverage our region’s abundance of ethane. After ethane, the next most plentiful NGL is propane.
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Chairman Richard “Dick” Glick tried to pull a fast one earlier this year when he tried to permanently enshrine global warming considerations as a requirement to approve all new pipeline projects (see 
Antero Resources is one of the largest drillers in the Marcellus/Utica (with major assets in West Virginia). The company is the fifth largest natgas producer in the country and the second largest LNG exporter. It’s also one of our favorite Marcellus/Utica drillers. As good and careful as companies like Antero are when hiring, sometimes there’s a rotten apple found in the barrel. Such was the case with a former employee who headed up the company’s operations in WV–where most of its drilling happens. The former employee took bribes and kickbacks from a vendor over a period of years (2012-2015), steering contracts to that vendor. The vendor’s performance was not as good as other competitors. At the end of years of litigation, Antero has finally been awarded compensation from a jury, and a bit extra from a judge, to make up for the actions of their rogue employee.