NY, New England Moral Equivalent of Putin re Sabotaging Pipelines
There’s little doubt that Vladimir Putin ordered the bombing of his own undersea natural gas pipelines, the Nord Stream pipelines, for some sort of political purpose. Crazy? Sure. But also calculated. In a brilliant column on the Forbes website, author Dan Markind, a Philadelphia-based attorney, compares Putin’s actions in sabotaging his own pipelines to the politicians in New York and New England who are sabotaging pipelines to their respective regions.
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The federal government is falling all over itself to spend YOUR money on hydrogen and carbon capture projects. The so-called Infrastructure Bill from last year allocates $8 billion on hydrogen projects (with $7 billion being spent on 6-10 regional hubs). The misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) includes roughly $369 billion in incentives for energy and climate-related programs, including tax credits, research loans, and more. In other words, there are mountains of money available that companies can potentially access. Why shouldn’t M-U companies participate? Learn how to tap into all of that dough at the 
Just nine new permits to drill shale wells were issued across the three Marcellus/Utica states for Sept. 26 to Oct. 2. Pennsylvania turned in the second week in a row of very low new permits–just three issued, all of them to different companies in different counties. Ohio issued just four new permits, with two of them going to Encino Energy in Carroll County. And West Virginia issued just two new permits, both to Southwestern Energy in Brooke County.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Plan to drop Erie County sales tax on heating fuels includes natural gas; Business groups call on Biden to strengthen U.S. energy production; NATIONAL: Biden turns to Venezuela as Europe commits economic ‘suicide by genuflecting to green utopia’; INTERNATIONAL: Nord Stream leaks caused by detonations; The radical plans to counter high oil prices.
So what happens now that Joe Manchin’s plan to get his fellow Democrats to vote for a bill to finish up the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a “permitting reform” bill, is dead (see 
The Millennium Pipeline, which stretches 263 miles from Corning, NY, to just outside New York City, delivers Pennsylvania Marcellus and Utica gas to utility and power plant markets across New York State and into New England. Several companies jointly own the pipeline, which operates under its own corporate structure. Among those with an ownership interest are TC Energy (formerly TransCanada), utility giant National Grid, and pipeline company DT Midstream. Last week DT Midstream announced it would double its ownership stake in the Millennium from 26.25% to 52.50%. DT will pay $552 million to become the majority owner of the Millennium Pipeline.
On Monday, MDN told you that the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) Graduate School of Public Health and the Pennsylvania Department of Health (DOH) had “suddenly” pulled out of an event scheduled for yesterday to update the public on Pitt’s research on the potential health effects of hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania (see 
Eureka Resources, which operates three frack wastewater treatment facilities in the Marcellus Shale, is doing really cool stuff. In October 2019, the company began extracting lithium from Marcellus wastewater at one of its plants in Bradford County, PA (see 
BlackRock, which encourages investors to divest from companies that refuse to tow the ESG line (i.e. fossil energy companies), is feeling the heat. That is, BlackRock is beginning to lose money. Big money. First, West Virginia announced that all state-run pension plans would divest the divestors of BlackRock (see 
In July, the PA Independent Regulatory Review Commission (IRRC) voted 5-0 to approve Part I of the final Environmental Quality Board (EQB) regulation that supposedly will capture every last molecule of stray methane that leaks from shale drilling operations (see 
Equinor, Norway’s largest oil company (state-owned, used to be called Statoil before they became ashamed to have the word “oil” in their name), announced it had achieved 100% certification for its natural gas produced in the Ohio Utica using Equitable Origin’s EO100™ standard. Equinor now produces “responsible” natural gas for its 27,000 operational net acres, and 242,000 non-operational net acres. Congrats!
We’re confused. The State of Connecticut has been on a holy mission to eliminate natural gas-fired power plants in the state. In January of this year, Connecticut’s weak governor, Ned Lamont, gave in to radicals and helped torpedo a 650-megawatt, gas-fired plant slated to be built in eastern Connecticut (see 
Each month the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) publishes a huge report called Natural Gas Monthly. Last Friday, EIA issued the latest (September 2022) edition of the report. There is a LOT of information in the report–statistics, data, charts, you name it. And the report covers not just the U.S., but natural gas flows for all countries around the world. One aspect of the report deals with prices. The analysts at EIA excerpted some of that information into a post on the agency’s Today in Energy website, comparing the price of natural gas for both residential and commercial customers this year with the five-year rolling average. In real terms, the 2021 annual residential price was the highest since 2014, and the commercial price was the highest since 2015. It looks like we will fly by those statistics in 2022.