Electrical Generation | Energy Companies | EQT Corp | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Westmoreland County
EQT Invests in Fuel Cell Co. – Foresees Future Market for NatGas
A fuel cell manufacturer located in Westmoreland County, PA, WATT Fuel Cell, disclosed yesterday it has closed on its latest round of financing. The biggest investor? EQT Corporation. WATT has added EQT CEO Toby Rice to its board of directors. According to Caine Finnerty, WATT president and chief operating officer, “This round of investment enables WATT Fuel Cell to continue our advancement and commercialization of residential fuel cells, while funding additional innovation to develop larger fuel cell units for the industrial market.” So what is a fuel cell and why is EQT so pumped about them?
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The West Virginia Public Energy Authority is a seven-member board that aims to make the best use of WV’s abundant natural energy resources. State code gives the board power to buy, lease, and issue bonds to build electric power plants and natural gas transmission projects. Gov. Jim Justice reactivated the board last summer after it had been dormant for upwards of a decade. The first meeting of the new board was held yesterday. Our sense is that the board is still trying to figure out what the heck it’s supposed to do.
Penn State has launched a new research project to see if it can prove there is a link between water contamination in southwestern Pennsylvania and fracking. We’ve seen this movie before…or have we? In 2018 PA Gov. Tom Wolf, a liberal Democrat who sometimes supports the shale gas industry (as long as he can tax it) caved to demands from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to launch a “study” in a bid to “prove” cases of rare childhood cancer in southwestern PA can be tied to shale drilling in the region (see 
A Forbes article caught our eye and we had to do a double-take. Two liberals from the Left Coast, professors at the University of Washington, Seattle, wrote an honest and transparent article about how the crisis in Ukraine is making their fellow liberals take an honest, probing look at the policies they advocate for. Renewables, which the two profs support, are not enough to power the world today. Not in the real world of 2022 with Vlad Putin threatening to overrun half of Europe.
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Dakota Access Pipeline loses Supreme Court appeal; NATIONAL: Republicans push Biden to increase natural gas exports to Europe; ‘Green’ media misrepresents the world’s energy reality; INTERNATIONAL: Aramco closes $15.5B deal; Schlumberger launches new drilling service; How to beat Putin with natural gas; Reviving the MidCat natural gas pipeline critical to answering Putin aggression.
All eyes were on Equitrans Midstream as the company released its fourth quarter and full-year 2021 update yesterday. The reason all eyes were on Equitrans is MVP–the Mountain Valley Pipeline project. MVP simply can’t move beyond the leftist Democrat judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Every time Big Green groups, including the Sierra Club (funded in part with foreign money) challenges permits for MVP, the Democrat judges of the 4th Circuit go along and overturn the permits (see 
Despite all of Europe’s arrogant talk about rejecting America’s “fracked gas” as too dirty, the Old World imported more gas from the U.S. than from any other country on planet earth in 2021, thanks to Donald Trump’s efforts to export “molecules of freedom” to other countries around the planet. Hey Democrat media, who’s laughing now about those “molecules of freedom” with Vladimir Putin breathing down Europe’s neck?
Shell, which recently dropped “Royal Dutch” from its name after leaving The Netherlands due to high taxes and overregulation, is one of the world’s supermajors (oil and gas driller). Shell is also one of (perhaps THE) largest producers of LNG, or liquefied natural gas, in the world. The company has just released its sixth annual LNG Outlook 2022 (full copy below) which highlights key trends in 2021 and hauls out the crystal ball to predict where things are heading over the next 20 years. Shell says global demand for LNG is expected to nearly double (up 90%) to 700 million tonnes by 2040. Why? Because natgas emits less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than other alternatives.
Here’s an interesting twist. Baker Hughes (BH), one of the biggest oilfield services companies on the planet, is investing in a company that designs and builds natural gas-fired electric power plants. But not just any gas-fired power plants. These plants use new technology so that when the natural gas is burned (to produce heat to spin a turbine), there is no, as in zero, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Technology to lower or eliminate CO2 emissions has been available for sometime, but typically has been too expensive. This new tech BH is backing promises to be much lower cost.
The wild roller coaster continues of up, down, up, down, up, down. Last week the number of permits issued to drill new shale wells is down again–to 18 total. Pennsylvania had 16 new permits last week, nine for Repsol and three for Coterra Energy. All of Repsol and Coterra’s permits issued for Susquehanna County. West Virginia had two new permits, one each for Southwestern Energy and Antero Resources, in Marshall and Doddridge counties. Ohio? A big, fat, goose egg. No new shale permits issued last week in the Buckeye State.
In the “with friends like these” department…One of the main partners with Equitrans Midstream in the project to build the 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) project is NextEra Energy (31% ownership). MVP took it on the chin three weeks ago when the Democrat judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overturned a key permit and a key FERC decision to allow MVP to finish up. The pipeline is 94% complete and in the ground. Yet now, because of those court rulings, NextEra Energy says the pipeline has a “very low probability” of completion.
Olympus Energy (formerly Huntley & Huntley), which drills in southwestern Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh, has just entered into a contract with U.S. Well Services (USWS) to provide the company with electric fracking. The deal calls for USWS to provide electric fracking to Olympus for 2022 with a potential contract extension until 2024. What is electric fracking?
One of the great things about the oil and gas industry is that it never stops innovating. O&G companies are always tinkering, trying new things. That includes both new technology and new techniques. Such innovation was on full display at the recent Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference (HFTC), held in The Woodlands, Texas, on February 1-3. Ian Palmer, author of “The Shale Controversy” and a Forbes website contributor, attended the event and provides an update on new innovations in low-tech, high-tech, and climate-tech.