Chesapeake Bay Foundation Says Proposed Va. Power Plant is Racist
A natural gas-fired electric power plant planned for Charles City County (near Richmond, Va.) by NOVI Energy known as C4GT (Charles City Combined-Cycle Gas Turbine) is officially dead as of last month (see Richmond, Va. Gas-Fired Power Plant Project Gets Canceled). NOVI had been working on the 1,100-megawatt project for over six years. An even larger plant planned for the same general area, the 1,650 MW Chickahominy Power Station (a project of Balico) is still in the works (see Virginia Approves Marcellus-Fired Power Plant Project Near Richmond). Since anti-fossil fuelers can’t seem to block the Chickahominy project, they’re playing their last card, the card they reserve when all else fails. Antis say the Chickahominy plant is racist.
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Since 2017 we’ve had our eye on a proposed natural gas-fired power plant, tracking the project in our “best of the rest” stories. The Nemadji Trail Energy Center would be built near Superior, Wisconsin but provide much of its electricity to nearby Minnesota. We don’t believe any of the molecules slated to flow to the plant will come from the Marcellus/Utica, so the project has never risen to the level of getting its own dedicated post here on MDN–until today. No, we still don’t believe M-U gas will power the plant, but a recent court decision about the plant caught our eye and gave us hope that other places like New York may yet be salvageable.
Oilfield services (OFS) companies are bouncing back. Oil and natural gas drilling is “ramping up as demand continues to hold on despite a global resurgence of coronavirus infections.” And that is “sweet music to the ears of oil-field services providers in the United States.” So says Dan Eberhart. He should know. Eberhart is CEO of Canary, one of the largest privately-owned OFS companies in the United States. He also serves as a consultant to the energy industry in North America, Asia, and Africa. Eberhart, writing on the Forbes website, says drilling and equipment contractors “are preparing for a multi-year upcycle on the back of recovering demand and rising commodity prices.”
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Duke Energy teams with Accenture and Microsoft to develop methane-emissions monitoring; NATIONAL: Oil soars Monday following a difficult week; Associated natural gas production declines in 2020, following three years of growth; High propane prices fail to put the brakes on exports; Williams CFO John Chandler plans to retire in 2022; INTERNATIONAL: Why is Joe Biden, who hung up on Keystone XL, desperately calling OPEC’s oil hotline?
Several mainstream media outlets who either didn’t read or intentionally lie about the results revealed in a new study are reporting a link between fracking and impacts on surface waters–particularly in the Marcellus Shale. In fact, the study, published in the journal Science, shows the authors found no such link. They found “a small increase in certain ions associated with hydraulic fracturing across several locations” that likely come from accidental spills of brine. And those slight increases disappear after a few months.
Yesterday the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a puff piece praising Brian Anderson, director of the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) and now the head of the Biden administration’s Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization, an effort to kill the use of fossil fuels (see 
A profoundly biased and inaccurate article published by Environmental Health News attempts to paint two proposed shale gas wells as an environmental disaster and existential health threat akin to a nuclear meltdown. The article is so over the top it’s laughable–but instructive nonetheless. Apex Energy has proposed drilling two wells on a pad in a rural part of Trafford, PA township, straddling Allegheny and Westmoreland counties. The location is “within one mile of Level Green Elementary School and within two miles of 12,733 residents in Penn Township and Trafford Borough (about 17 miles east of Pittsburgh).” Are the kiddies at nearby schools and residents of Trafford really in danger?
On Wednesday, the Pennsylvania Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee approved a letter to the state’s Independent Regulatory Review Commission (IRRC), asking the IRRC to oppose the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), an obscene carbon tax aimed at closing down coal and natural gas-fired power plants in the state. Democrats on the committee railed against the vote calling it meaningless when they know it’s anything but. If the IRRC turns against RGGI, the left’s carbon tax scheme will die.
It’s been our observation since beginning to write about the shale energy space in 2009 that every year or two most drillers, at least the publicly traded drillers, issue new notes (what we call IOUs) to pay off already-issued notes coming due within a few years. And if there’s any money left over from the new tranch of notes issued, they use it to pay down other debts or “for other corporate purposes.” The latest swap-new-notes-for-old-notes comes from a major Marcellus/Utica driller, Southwestern Energy, which last week floated $1.2 billion of new notes to help pay off what amounts to $1.4 billion of older notes coming due in the next few years.
Nuverra Environmental Solutions (formerly Heckmann) is one of the largest companies in the United States that handles the transportation and disposal of shale drilling wastewater and leftover rock and dirt from drilling. The company has major operations in the Marcellus/Utica region. We keep an eye on its performance as an indicator of whether there is more or less drilling happening in the M-U. For over a year, it’s been less. In 2020 Nuverra’s revenue sank by 34% and the rig count that it tracks fell by 27% (see 
It’s been hard to miss the recent “the sky is falling” report issued by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Mainstream media has been in the throes of multiple orgasms over the