Cove Point Hits Major Milestone – Loads 300th Marcellus LNG Cargo
Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s (BHE) GT&S subsidiary announced that the Cove Point LNG export facility, which BHE GT&S operates, reached a major milestone at the end of July. Cove Point has loaded its 300th commercial LNG export cargo. All of the molecules that Cove Point liquefies come from the Marcellus Shale. MDN was there from the beginning, chronicling the journey from idea to construction to (now) loading 300 cargo ships full of Marcellus LNG. What a journey!
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Once a month, the analysts (interns?) at the U.S. Energy Information Administration grab the official Henry Hub pricing dart board and play a quick game to determine what price they will predict for the average Henry Hub spot price for natural gas for the rest of this year, and then an average price for all of next year. At least, that’s what EIA’s predictions have come to feel like. How else to describe the wild gyrations both up and down in EIA’s monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook predictions? Here’s what we mean…
PublicSource, a leftist, partisan “news” organization based in Pittsburgh, has published a surprisingly helpful and informative article on Pennsylvania’s efforts to attract one of the four $2 billion hydrogen hubs provided for in Biden’s so-called infrastructure bill. The article outlines what a hydrogen hub is (and is not), and how it connects to the state’s Marcellus industry. Most of the article is free of leftist dribble (although some bias and misinformation does creep in). For the most part, this is a good primer and backgrounder on hydrogen energy.
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Free technical training certification for oil, natural gas careers; The expansion of Permian gas infrastructure is far from over; NATIONAL: USA oilfield services sector employment rises in July; INTERNATIONAL: Oil edges lower as Russian flows get ready to resume; Germany debates lifting fracking ban as it confronts energy supply crisis; Centrica signs $8.45 billion deal to import U.S. LNG to U.K.; Pakistan seeks 72 LNG cargoes for six years as energy woes bite.
Summit Midstream Partners, formed in 2009 and headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas, operates natural gas, crude oil, and produced water gathering (pipeline) systems in several unconventional shale plays, including the Marcellus and Utica. Last week Summit issued its second quarter 2022 update. While most upstream and midstream companies have seen positive cash flow and profits over the past year, Summit continues to miss the mark. The company lost $92 million in 2Q22 versus losing $20 million in 2Q21. Much of the loss seems to revolve around the impairment (writedown) of $84.5 million related to the sale of its Lane Gathering and Processing System in the Delaware Basin.
Every single year Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf proposed a budget (all eight years of his ignominious occupation of the office), he insisted on raising taxes on the Marcellus industry by adding a high severance tax to an already-high impact tax. Every. Single. Year. In addition to an impact (i.e. severance) tax in PA, Marcellus drillers must pay an insanely high corporate net income tax (CNIT) of 9.99%. All businesses in the state are subject to the CNIT. Because of the high tax burden (the impact tax and the CNIT added together), many drillers have decided to expand elsewhere, like West Virginia, Ohio, and Louisiana. Now that he’s leaving office, Wolf has signed on to a reduction of the CNIT, claiming he never liked that nasty ole tax anyway.
One of the unforeseen “benefits” of the Manchin-Schumer “Make Inflation Higher” bill is that it will empower the jackbooted thugs who control the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by empowering them to enforce onerous regulations that require expensive technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCS) to be used by the oil and gas industry. Welcome to Amerika. The U.S. Supreme Court recently clipped EPA’s wings with respect to limiting the agency’s misinterpretation of the Clean Air Act in order to regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power plants (see 
BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest investment firm with $10 trillion in assets under management, is beginning to feel the heat of its anti-fossil fuel strategy. BlackRock is, without question, anti-fossil fuel energy. Yet the company and its representatives object when being outed as what they are, claiming they still love love love oil and gas companies. It’s not true. BlackRock pressures investors and investment funds to divest from fossil energy companies on the premise those companies are harming the planet. BlackRock itself is now being “harmed” by states like West Virginia, which has decided to end doing business with the company (see 
Two weeks ago, MDN brought you the news that a small amount of natural gas–roughly 22 MMcf/d (million cubic feet per day)–is once again flowing into the closed Freeport LNG export facility (see 
Loathsome and disgusting shale energy hater Josh Shapiro, Attorney General for Pennsylvania (running for governor), announced on Friday that he finally bullied Energy Transfer into pleading “no contest” (meaning they don’t admit to a darned thing) in a so-called criminal case against the company for a series of accidents affecting construction for both the Revolution and Mariner East pipelines. Shapiro brought the case–a case that converts accidents into crimes–in order to burnish his credibility with the wacko left in his own party. Now he has a “victory” to run on–and everyone in Pennsylvania is the poorer because of it.
Southwestern Energy, which along with EQT and Chesapeake Energy, is one of the three leading producers of natural gas in the U.S., issued its second quarter update last Friday. The company reported total net production of 438 Bcfe (billion cubic feet equivalent), or 4.8 Bcfe/d, including 4.2 Bcf/d of natural gas and 100,000 barrels per day (Bbls/d) of liquids. Southwestern invested $585 million of capital during 2Q and placed 42 wells to sales, including 23 in the Marcellus/Utica and 19 in Haynesville. The company made $1.2 billion in profit during 2Q22, versus losing $609 million in the same quarter a year ago.
On July 1, just as everyone was heading out the door for summer vacation, Ascent Resources announced it is buying another 26,800 acres in the Ohio Utica for $270 million (see 
PennEnergy Resources LLC, which according to the Pittsburgh Business Times is the 11th largest shale driller in Pennsylvania (with 405 active shale wells), achieved responsibly sourced natural gas certification from Project Canary on nearly all of its wells in January of this year (see