CNX Foundation Accepting Grant Applications Thru Oct 31st
In April, CNX Resources Corp. announced instead of just blowing smoke about ESG (environmental, social, governance) with pretty slide shows and hoopla, they would donate $30 million to local, underserved communities and populations in the tri-state region (see CNX Investing $30M in Underprivileged Communities in Tri-state Area). In July, CNX announced the formation of a new nonprofit to oversee the distribution of that money–to make sure it really helps those who need it, called the CNX Foundation (see CNX Creates Nonprofit to Oversee $30M Community Fund). The CNX Foundation yesterday announced it is officially open for business, accepting applications for grants.
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What will happen to the United States if it embarks on sleepy Joe Biden’s “vision” for dumping fossil fuels via regulation and over taxation and instead turns to so-called renewable sources of energy, all in a bid to keep Mom Earth from supposedly toasting? We know what will happen. It’s already happening in the United Kingdom. We have a perfect preview of what will hit us if we adopt the same policies the UK and Europe have adopted: electricity prices out of sight, shortages of natural gas, blackouts and brownouts, high unemployment, and an economy in the crapper.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Shale event highlights need for natural gas in PA; Pennsylvania association launches training facility, program; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Texas upstream employment grows; Joyce, Haas team up to bring natural gas to Pembroke Township; NATIONAL: US weekly LNG exports go up, Henry Hub prices drop; Democratic bill would force Fed to defund fossil fuels; MacArthur Foundation joins investment shift away fossil fuels; Big Green, Inc. flexes its political muscle.
Lest you think we’ve been overstating the case that Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf wants to end the use of natural gas-fired electric power plants as evidenced by his actions in forcing the state to join the draconian Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) carbon tax scheme, Wolf’s latest so-called climate plan will remove all doubt for you. Yesterday Wolf and his obsequious Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary Pat McDonnell released a 278-page “climate” plan that, among other things, essentially bans natural gas-fired power plants.
The weather turning a bit cooler along with a three-week planned maintenance outage at the Cove Point LNG plant in Maryland is causing the spot price for natural gas in the Marcellus and Utica to fall precipitously. Of course the price recently, over the past few weeks, rose precipitously–so a sudden fall is not all that unusual. How much has the price fallen and how far will it go down?
While natural gas prices have always floated up and down, lately we’ve seen a rapid run-up in the NYMEX futures price that hit a seven-year high last week (see 
Five Big Green groups (some of them funded by foreign governments) led by one of the worst–the Sierra Club–are lobbying the Pennsylvania Environmental Quality Board (EQB) to force PA’s oil and gas drillers to prepay the full amount to decommission wells they drill today and likely won’t be played out for at least 30, maybe as much as 50 years from now. It’s yet another attempt to make drilling for natural gas and oil in the Keystone State so onerous, so expensive, drillers will give up.
On the topic of plugging old, abandoned (orphan) oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania, here’s an example of the oil and gas industry stepping up to do the right thing. Seneca Resources is paying to have a century-old conventional well plugged in McKean County, PA. It’s a well Seneca did not drill and has no responsibility to plug. Yet they are.
A sad exclusive to share with you today. Yesterday northeast Pennsylvania driller Rockdale Marcellus filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. The company, which owns and operates 66 producing wells on 42,897 net acres in three northeast PA counties (regional headquarters in Pittsburgh) plans to auction off all of its assets according to paperwork filed with the court.
Although the price of natural gas has rocketed this year and cash flows for Marcellus/Utica drillers have ballooned, showering drillers with plenty of free cash flow, M-U drillers are spending less (19% less) on capital expenditures than they did in 2020. Production in the M-U is up slightly by 4% so far in 2021 vs. 2020. The experts at RBN Energy have dived into this latest twist in the shale story to help explain what’s going on and why.
If this doesn’t prove that the environmental left isn’t really interested in the environment, but instead only in their leftist (Communistic) policies, nothing will prove it to you. A radical faction of Physicians for Social Responsibility calling itself “Concerned Health Professionals of Pennsylvania” (a false statement if ever there was one) is actively, aggressively trying to end the ability of Pennsylvania’s fracking companies to recycle wastewater (brine) that comes from naturally-occurring water deep in the ground. They figure if they can stop fracking’s green recycling program, maybe they can shut down fracking period. Sick.
Not only is gas so-called “responsible gas” if it’s extracted from the ground in a certain way, it’s even more “responsible” if it flows through a pipeline a certain way. That’s the theory anyway. In June of this year, Southwestern Energy announced it was working with Project Canary to certify all of its Marcellus/Utica gas production as responsible (see