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Federal Judge Overrules NY Town to Allow NFG Compressor Station
National Fuel Gas Company’s (NFG) $500 million Northern Access Pipeline project aims to build 97 miles of new pipeline along a power line corridor from northwestern Pennsylvania up to Erie County, NY to flow PA Marcellus fracked shale gas into the Empire State. The project also calls for 3 miles of new pipeline and a compressor station in Niagara County, NY. The Town of Pendleton, where the compressor station will be located, has refused to issue a permit for the station. Yesterday a federal judge overruled the town and said NFG can move forward with construction of the compressor station when it’s ready to do so.
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Waaaiiit just a minute. Did we just slip through the looking glass? Ten Democrat State Senators from West Virginia sent a letter earlier this week to Warren Buffett asking the billionaire to consider investing in natural gas projects in the Mountain State. The letter states their sadness that Atlantic Coast Pipeline was canceled, but expresses hope that Buffett’s purchase of Dominion’s other pipeline assets augurs a bright future. We could have sworn this letter was sent by conservative Republicans!
Pennsylvania’s Pipeline Investment Program (or PIPE) grants cover part of the cost for building new natural gas pipelines to connect homes and businesses, typically in rural parts of the state, to homegrown Marcellus Shale gas supplies. We’ve written about many of the more-than-a-dozen (so far) PIPE grant projects in the past (
Joe Biden, reading like a robot from a teleprompter with no live audience and taking no questions from reporters (to guard against exposing his advancing dementia), yesterday introduced a $2 trillion so-called climate plan. Part of Biden’s plan, no doubt concocted by the likes of Alexandria Occasional-Cortex (AOC), calls for using the jackboots of the federal government to force all states to abandon all electric power generation from sources that produce “carbon” by 2035. That, dear readers, includes eliminating all natural gas-fired power plants and coal-fired power plants, which today produce two-thirds of all electricity produced in the U.S.A.
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Weymouth officials say venting of natural gas allowed near compressor site; NATIONAL: Saying the quiet part out loud: anti-pipeline leader admits true motivation for activism; U.S. crude oil and natural gas production in April had biggest monthly decreases in years; Energy storage’s emerging challenge to natural gas in the power sector.
Yesterday our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), issued our favorite monthly report, the Drilling Productivity Report (DPR). The DPR estimates how much oil and natural gas each of the country’s seven largest shale plays produced in the previous (current) month, and how much each will produce in the coming (next) month. The July report, which predicts production for the coming month of August, estimates natural gas production in the Marcellus/Utica will decrease by 210 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d)–the biggest decrease for any of the major shale plays.
Whew. We can now breathe a sigh of relief. On July 7 TC Energy’s Columbia Gas Transmission subsidiary announced an unplanned outage (for maintenance work) for the Mountaineer XPress (MXP) pipeline in West Virginia–near Leach, Kentucky (see 
Wow! That was fast! Last week we brought you the rumor that a bill to allow incentives for petrochemical plants willing to build new facilities in Pennsylvania (generating hundreds of jobs and hundreds of millions of investment in the state) appears to be back on after the bill was previously vetoed by Gov. Tom Wolf earlier this year (see 
Yesterday Kinder Morgan asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for permission to bring Elba Island Train #8 online to produce and ship LNG. Train #8 will increase Elba’s active train count to seven (out of ten). One month ago KM asked FERC for permission to begin testing Train #9 (see 
Pieridae Energy wants to build an LNG export plant in Nova Scotia, Canada. The project is called the Goldboro LNG project. Yesterday Pieridae announced the company they had contracted with to build Goldboro, KBR (Kellogg Brown & Root Limited), has notified Pieridae it is pulling out of the contract to build it. Pieridae says it is evaluating its legal options.
Hi-Crush Inc., a frac sand company headquartered in Houston, TX, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Hi-Crush provides frac sand/proppants to a number of shale plays across the country, including the Marcellus/Utica. In its filing, the company seeks to convert $450 million of its $699 million of debt into equity (shares of stock), diluting existing shares for existing stockholders. As is typical, existing shareholders get the short end of the stick.
A warning right up front: This post is speculation and rumor. As you know if you’ve read MDN (or any other media source covering oil and gas in the past two weeks), on June 28 Chesapeake Energy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (see 
It’s time to revisit a long-festering royalty lawsuit against Chesapeake Energy and Anadarko Petroleum filed by the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office. The case has been through several layers of courts and finally ended up at the PA Supreme Court last fall (see 
Last week we brought you the rumor that a bill to allow incentives for petrochemical plants willing to build new facilities in Pennsylvania (generating hundreds of jobs and hundreds of millions of investment in the state) appears to be back on after the bill was vetoed by Gov. Tom Wolf earlier this year (see 
How much of an effort is “enough” when a surface landowner in Ohio tries to locate the owner(s) of the belowground mineral rights under his or her land using the Dormant Mineral Act (DMA)? Is it enough to search the public record archive in the county where the land is located? The Ohio Supreme Court recently ruled in a case to say no, it’s not enough to run a quick search in one county when attempting to locate mineral rights owners.