Petulant Antis Demand Meeting with NJ Transit re Gas Power Plant
Behaving like the petulant children they are, anti-fossil fuelers in New Jersey are demanding a face-to-face meeting with the board of NJ Transit so they can make a case (i.e. bully the board) against building a small, clean-burning natural gas-fired power plant NJ Transit will be used to power trains in cases of emergency. It’s a backup plant–not even running all the time. Yet antis, so corrupted by their own hatred of “fossil fuels,” are demanding NJ Transit use unreliable solar instead.
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For the second week in a row, both Pennsylvania and West Virginia issued permits to drill new shale wells last week, and Ohio did not. PA issued 12 new permits for wells on three well pads. WV issued 3 new permits, all for the same well pad. PA’s new permits were split between Bradford County in the northeastern part of the state, and Washington County in the southwestern part of the state. The WV permits were issued in Brooke County, located in the northern panhandle of the state.
S&P Global Market Intelligence has done some forensic analysis of permits issued to drill new shale wells in Pennsylvania during August 2020. They compared last month’s permit numbers with the numbers from a year ago and found that PA issued 77 new permits last month, down 24% from August 2019.
Anti-fossil fuel zealots like the nutty Sierra Club have successfully delayed completion of Equitrans Midstream’s 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline from West Virginia to southern Virginia with lawsuits. The project is now 92% done and in the ground. The zealots successfully convinced Democrat federal judges to overturn key permits issued by several government agencies. One of those overturned permits, issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) for endangered species, has just been reissued. Score a victory for the good guys.
The Republican-controlled Pennsylvania legislature continues its quest to stop Gov. Tom Wolf from illegally assuming powers he does not have to force the state into a carbon tax scheme called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). Last Thursday the state Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee voted to report out two bills for a full Senate vote that will block Wolf’s Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) from joining RGGI without legislative approval.
In late 2018 a fringe environmental group called the Coalition to Reroute NEXUS (CORN), along with the City of Oberlin, Ohio, filed yet another lawsuit (with the D.C. Court of Appeals) to nullify the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) original decision to approve the NEXUS Pipeline project that runs through Ohio (see
It’s not unusual for companies in the business of delivering methane molecules to customers (the local gas utility company) to invest in the long-haul gas pipelines that deliver gas into their system. Consolidated Edison (ConEd), which serves much of New York City and its suburbs with natural gas, is one such company.

A few weeks ago MDN told you about Peregrine Energy Partners buying royalty payment rights from landowners in Doddridge County, WV (see
We should have known that West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice is in league with his fellow coal baron Robert Murray. Officials from Brooke County, WV, where Energy Solutions Consortium is planning to build a $1.25 billion natural gas-fired power plant, are blaming the long fingers of Bob Murray for a last-minute delay of a state loan guarantee that was supposed to be made in August (see 
In early August the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) finally issued a favorable environmental assessment (EA) for an amended request by PennEast Pipeline to break the project into two phases–building the pipeline through Pennsylvania in Phase One, and through New Jersey in Phase Two (see