Putting Recent ME2 Marsh Creek Lake Mud Spill in Perspective
Two weeks ago while drilling in Chester County in Marsh Creek State Park, Energy Transfer’s Mariner East (ME) 2X pipeline experienced an “inadvertent return”–nontoxic drilling mud coming up out of the ground where it’s not supposed to (see Mariner East 2X Construction Causes Another Drilling Mud Spill). In this case the mud came up in a small section of the 535-acre Marsh Creek Lake. Hostile Democrat politicians in Chester County immediately jumped on the leak (which didn’t kill a single fish) to demand the state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) revoke the pipeline’s permits to build in the county–forever. A former politician from Chester County offers a different view of this latest episode and the partisan calls to stop ME2.
Read More “Putting Recent ME2 Marsh Creek Lake Mud Spill in Perspective”
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Shale gas impact fee receipts down; future take a wild card; Natural gas prices are on fire, but producers are holding back; Local activists will paddle in protest of proposed Kearny natural gas plant; ExxonMobil Petrochemicals moving into PA?; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Lack of natural gas infrastructure hurts NC; The blithering idiocy of California’s energy policies; NATIONAL: Federal data show the high cost of electrifying homes; US weekly LNG exports rise to 11 cargoes; Flex LNG expects U.S. cargo cancellations to decrease in September; Natural Gas is the bridge to climate change nirvana; An effective ESG strategy strengthens the competitiveness of US liquefied natural gas; Natural gas price fundamental daily forecast – focus shifts to potential production disruption.
MDN is taking today off. For a couple of reasons. One is a vacation day. The other is that we recently (overnight) updated the site to the latest version of WordPress, the software we use to run the site. 
Pittsburgh-based IntegrServ, a trucking company partly owned by former Pittsburgh Steeler Jerome Bettis, filed a federal lawsuit yesterday against EQT claiming discrimination against the company as a minority-owned company after it canceled a contract worth some $66 million last year. This is an involved story and of course, there are always two sides to every story (and two sides to every lawsuit).
Peregrine Energy Partners, headquartered in Dallas, Texas, continues a program to buy royalty rights in the Marcellus/Utica. Peregrine announced yesterday the company has cut a deal to buy “producing royalties in Doddridge County, West Virginia from several private sellers.” The private sellers are landowners/rights owners with wells drilled by Antero Resources and Jay-Bee Oil & Gas. No details on how much the deal was for.
FirstEnergy Solutions (now called Energy Harbor) allegedly paid $60 million in bribes to (now former) Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and four of his associates to gain their assistance in passing the hugely unpopular House Bill 6 (see 
Ohio’s oil and natural gas producers via OOGEEP (Ohio Oil & Gas Energy Education Program) have just launched a major statewide public awareness campaign dubbed Essential Ohio Energy. The campaign includes (so far) two TV commercials (we have both embedded below). OOGEEP is spending big money to blanket the state and remind folks of the key role played by fossil fuels in every single aspect of their lives. We need to see more of this kind of thing.
We spotted a great editorial in an Ohio newspaper that succinctly and accurately describes what will happen in Ohio if Joe Biden’s environmental socialism program (cost of $2 trillion) actually gets implemented. What would happen? Some 700,000 jobs in Ohio will disappear. So too will some $245 billion in Ohio GDP (gross domestic product). It is, literally, a nightmare.
In June the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), in coordination with the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) published final rules to allow LNG (liquefied natural gas) to be safely transported by special rail cars (see 
We spotted a story from ace reporter Paul Gough (Pittsburgh Business Times) titled, “5 things to know about Pennsylvania’s new energy report.” According to Gough, earlier this week PA released a new “Pennsylvania Energy Jobs Overview” report. Wait, what? Why didn’t the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) or Gov. Wolf’s office issue a press release to announce this new report? We don’t know why, but they didn’t. The DEP did issue a press release about an uptick in jobs in the so-called renewable energy sector–but nothing about all the other forms of energy. However, we have a copy of the full report (below). It shows the total number of jobs in the Marcellus/Utica went down last year by 7.4%, or 1,897 jobs lost.
Last week we brought you the bombshell news that Southwestern Energy is buying out and merging in Montage Resources in an all-stock deal worth roughly $857 million (see 
Range Resources is running up the debt tab. In January the company issued $550 million in new notes (debt, IOUs) which they used to turn around and pay down older notes (see 
Today is “notes” day on MDN. Yesterday three major Marcellus/Utica drillers, including Southwestern, Range, and the subject of this post–Antero Resources–all said they are issuing notes, or what we think of as IOUs (debt) in varying amounts. All of the notes issued are for the same reason–to pay down debt. Issue new debt to pay down old debt. Only in the world of high finance! For Antero, the company is issuing $250 million with an extra option to issue another $50 million, or $300 million total, potentially.