11 Democrat AGs Ask FERC to Stop Approving Pipes During Pandemic
Rahm Emanuel (Democrat), former Mayor of Chicago and former Chief of Staff in the Bill Clinton White House, once famously quipped, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” Emanuel’s fellow Democrats who control 10 states plus the District of Columbia are taking his advice. The AGs from each of those states sent a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) yesterday asking FERC to delay approving any new pipeline projects until the virus pandemic is over.
Read More “11 Democrat AGs Ask FERC to Stop Approving Pipes During Pandemic”
MDN is updating our 
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: New York fracking ban proves costly during pandemic; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Virginia Natural Gas releases plan to hire dozens of workers in Hampton Roads; South Jersey Gas opens compressed natural gas station in Middle Township; NATIONAL: U.S. weekly LNG exports rise; Some shale drillers are restarting production at $25 oil; Oil rebound may have gone too far, based on just tentative supply and demand improvements; In fracking’s new world order, only the strongest will survive; Natural gas drops after rise in stockpiles; INTERNATIONAL: Trump’s removal of troops from Saudi Arabia is also about oil.
Last December Chevron announced it was writing down the value of its Marcellus/Utica assets and putting those assets up for sale (see 
Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a 303-mile Marcellus/Utica gas pipeline from West Virginia to southern Virginia, is 90% built and in the ground. The final 10% is waiting on various lawsuits and regulatory agencies to resolve outstanding issues brought on by radicalized green groups. One of the places the pipeline has long been done and in the ground is Lewis County, WV. It’s a mountainous area. Inspectors recently discovered there have been “slips” of the land resulting in “at least three locations” where MVP has shifted.
Add another 300 workers returned to work at the mighty Shell ethane cracker construction site in Beaver County, PA this past Monday. This follows the lifting of a ban on construction activities by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf. With the extra 300 workers back on the job, some 800 workers are now active at the site, just 10% of the 8,000 working on-site prior to the coronavirus pandemic lockdown.
On Tuesday MDN told you that the Texas Eastern Pipeline Company (TETCO) pipeline running through Kentucky had exploded for a second time in a year (see 
We previously told you about Gov. Wolf’s executive order (EO) to force Pennsylvania to join with northeastern states in the so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a regional alliance to slap a carbon tax on coal and natural gas-fired electric plants in order to force them out of business (see 
In mid-March as the twin blows of the coronavirus pandemic and the Saudis and Russians decided to tank oil prices, Halliburton, the second-largest oilfield services company on the planet, announced it would furlough 3,500 workers for 60 days (see 
Enverus (formerly Drillinginfo) is a leading data, software and insights company that provides information to upstream, midstream, and downstream companies. Enverus experts have just published an “Oil and Gas Fundamentals Update” featuring the impacts of COVID-19. VP of Strategic Analytics for Enverus, Bernadette Johnson, says “there will still be more painful announcements, but we are seeing the bottom” of the current oil and gas price crash. It will be painful and slow, but we now begin to crawl back up out of the hole we are in.
Williams, the midstream/pipeline giant with major operations and assets in the Marcellus Shale, released its first-quarter update and held a conference call with analysts yesterday. The company wrote down the value of several projects, including the Constitution Pipeline, which led to a paper loss of $518 million in 1Q20. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Marcellus (which Williams calls its Northeast G&P segment) saw revenues rise 23% in 1Q20.
Dominion Energy issued its first-quarter 2020 update yesterday showing the company had a paper loss (due to impairments) of $270 million in 1Q. Given the company wrote down $2.6 billion worth of assets, losing $270 million on paper seems pretty darned good. Dominion is a BIG company with lots of different businesses. It is a midstream/pipeline company, a power generation company, and a utility delivering power to end-users. Lots of fingers, lots of pies. The one thing we were looking for in this update is new info about the company’s 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) from the Marcellus/Utica to Virginia and North Carolina.
In September 2017 to much fanfare, CSX (railroad company) announced the opening of its new Pittsburgh Intermodal Rail Terminal in McKees Rocks, PA. The new facility is a truck and railroad transloading facility connecting southwestern Pennsylvania to markets across the country and around the world. CSX said at the time, “The Pittsburgh intermodal terminal is the last key component of CSX’s National Gateway Initiative, an $850 million public-private partnership designed to create a highly efficient network of double-stack rail and intermodal terminals, connecting East Coast markets to consumers, manufacturers and businesses in the Midwest.” That was then, this is now.
Two weeks ago MDN told you about Virginia Natural Gas (VNG) and their request for state permission to build 24 miles of new pipeline and two new compressor stations (expanding a third compressor), connecting to the mighty Transco pipeline system to flow Marcellus/Utica gas to the northeast Va. region (see 
The Trump Administration listens. And acts. Two weeks ago Marcellus/Utica drillers and members of Congress from western Pennsylvania lobbied the Trump Administration for changes to the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) to allow M-U drillers to participate (see