Ohio Bill Creates Tax Breaks for Natural Gas Infrastructure Projects
Last week two Ohio state House members, Reps. Jon Cross, R-Kenton, and Jay Edwards, R-Nelsonville, introduced House Bill (HB) 685 to promote the use of the state’s natural gas energy resource. The bill would create “ENERGIZEOhio Zones” to attract new investment in areas that are disadvantaged due to lack of energy resources. The designation allows natural gas infrastructure projects (like pipelines) to receive tax abatements and speed up depreciation to lower the overall cost of development.
Read More “Ohio Bill Creates Tax Breaks for Natural Gas Infrastructure Projects”
Earlier this week MDN told you that some Marcellus/Utica operators were singing the praises of the Manchin-Schumer Keep Inflation High bill (see 
Yesterday MDN poked fun at the gyrating up-and-down predictions from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) with respect to the spot price of natural gas at the benchmark Henry Hub (see 
NATIONAL: Breweries scramble for CO2 amid shortage: ‘A scary situation’; Carbon capture didn’t make sense 12 years ago and it doesn’t make sense now; INTERNATIONAL: Can Europe live without Russian gas?; Irish fracking blarney shows why the West is dying; Europe’s dash for new LNG import infrastructure picks up pace.
Select Energy Services (SES) continues to expand with mergers and acquisitions. Earlier this year, SES bought out and merged in Nuverra Environmental Solutions (formerly Heckmann) for $45 million (see 
ECA Marcellus Trust I, the royalty interest holder in some of the wells drilled and maintained by Greylock Energy in Greene County, PA, announced it will issue a payout (the equivalent of a dividend) to unitholders of 17.6 cents for 2Q22. That is the highest payout we’ve seen since we’ve been actively tracing it quarter by quarter. The company continues to hold back some of the profits it makes to build a $3.8 million cash reserve.
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!
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.
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.