Anti-Drilling/Fossil Fuel | Energy Services | Equitrans/EQT Midstream | Industrywide Issues | Litigation | Pipelines | Virginia
4th Circus Clowns Overturn MVP Permit for Jeff Natl Forest, Again
The Lorax-quoting judge from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (i.e. 4th Circus) has struck again. We shouldn’t be surprised. Yesterday the 4th Circuit overruled permits issued by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management that would have allowed the 94% complete Mountain Valley Pipeline from crossing 3.5 miles of federal land in Jefferson National Forest. This is the second time the same group of clown judges have done this.
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ISO New England–the independent, non-profit Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) that manages the electric grid for Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont–is once again fretting and warning that a prolonged cold spell in the northeast may trigger electric blackouts in New England. Not only are power plant owners nervous, so too are state regulators.
In July 2021 Pieridae Energy, a Candian driller and LNG company, hired Peters & Co. Limited to help it conduct an internal review about the best path forward. Should the company sell itself? Should it merge with another company? Sell some of its assets but not others? The review is now over and done and the decision is…to keep on going just the way they have been. No sale, no merger, no asset sale. Why are we interested? Because of Pieridae’s proposed Goldboro LNG project.
Holy smokes! What just happened? For months (and months and months) the cumulative number of weekly permits issued to drill new shale wells in the Marcellus/Utica has fluctuated from the low teens to perhaps 30 total on the upper end. Last week, from Jan. 17-23, an amazing 61 permits were issued to drill new shale wells. Double the usual. Wow! Pennsylvania issued 24 new permits, Ohio issued 9, and blow-the-doors-off-we’ve-never-seen-so-many-permits-issued-in-one-week for West Virginia, the Mountain State issued 28 new shale permits.
NATIONAL: Time for investors to loosen the reins on shale producers; Exposing Baltimore’s short-sighted, frivolous climate lawsuit against energy companies; API Sommers urges support for “every type of energy”; INTERNATIONAL: Can we future-proof natural gas plants with hydrogen?; What happens if Russia cuts off Europe’s natural gas?; US’ ‘natural gas alliance’ aimed at containing Russia could hardly work.
U.S. Senator from West Virginia Shelley Moore Capito “Zoomed” in to address the Gas and Oil Association of West Virginia’s (GO-WV) annual winter meeting last week. She talked about the Biden infrastructure bill, which she supported, and Biden’s so-called Build Back Better bill, which she does not support. As part of her comments, Capito mentioned the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill includes money for “an Appalachian ethane/hydrogen storage hub.” Wow! We thought that project was long dead.
Barging along the Ohio River from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh (including the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Kanawha rivers) has always been a big business, critical to the economy of the Ohio River Valley region. Barging along the Ohio River is currently undergoing a transformation from coal and steel to petrochemicals and plastics. Why and how? In a phrase, the Marcellus/Utica shale is the reason.
Just a few weeks ago we told you a Shell rep said the mighty ethane cracker is 80% complete and the company is now searching for permanent employees to fill some 600 positions (see 
We’re seeing mixed signals for the price of natural gas in the Marcellus/Utica and where it may be heading in the near future. One set of signals is the day-ahead cash price (“spot price”)–the deals to sell physically-delivered natural gas at a certain price at a particular hub/location. The spot price for M-U gas at hubs like the Eastern Gas South (widely viewed as the benchmark in the M-U region), is up. But the forward price is, if anything, down a bit.
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) has banned the spreading of conventional oil and gas brine for any purpose on its over 6,500 miles of roads in PA State Forests. A majority of those roads are dirt and gravel. The ban also applies to all State Park roads (although most of those roads are paved and don’t need water for dust suppression, so it’s an empty gesture).
Midstream giant Williams’ chief operating officer, Michael Dunn, told an industry conference in Houston, TX yesterday that Joe Biden is “overlooking” the role natural gas can place in reducing emissions and decarbonizing the U.S. And that’s a big mistake. Dunn’s sentiment (in our words) is that the Bidenistas are unwilling to accept half-a-loaf now and instead prefer no loaf at all, which leads to more harmful emissions, not less.
The haughty and arrogant John Kerry is at it again. Kerry (who looks like Lurch on the Adams Family) spoke at a so-called “climate event” at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce yesterday. Kerry is Joe Biden’s special climate envoy. In his speech, Kerry had the audacity to warn other nations they should not invest in natural gas infrastructure because it causes “climate change”–whatever the heck that is. The climate always changes, but leftists like Kerry don’t seem to understand that concept.
Houston-based Schlumberger (pronounced Shlum-Bur-Zhay) is the world’s largest oilfield services company. They’re the company a majority of exploration and production companies (drillers) call when they want a new well drilled. The #2 company on speed dial for drilling new wells is Halliburton, and they’re not even close in size to #1 Schlumberger. On Friday Schlumberger issued its fourth quarter and full-year 2021 earnings report, holding a conference call to discuss results. Of particular interest to us was information detailing Schlumberger’s work for M-U driller CNX Resources.
In December, Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP), a subsidiary of Kinder Morgan, filed a proposal with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to implement a “responsibly sourced natural gas (RSG) supply aggregation pooling service” at select locations across the TGP system (see