NatGas Powergen Far Outpaces Renewables First Half 2020
Our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), posted an interesting article yesterday revealing information the left and mainstream media don’t want you to know: Natural gas-fired electricity is growing faster than renewables. The media would have you believe that so-called renewables are taking the world (and the U.S.) by storm–growing far faster than any other source, including natural gas. Not true.
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OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Oilfield service companies are bailing on the Permian; NATIONAL: Six former EPA heads call for an agency reset after the presidential election; Kamala Harris’ frac stance worrisome to shale states, attractive to the left; How bad is the shale downturn? Oxy has only one rig drilling the Permian.; U.S. permits for new horizontal drilling dip to 10-year low; Mounting gas storage in US Southeast threatens Henry Hub price rally; US midstream gas sector looks for signs of market improvement after pullback; Climate Fraud (video); INTERNATIONAL: Germany’s Maas confronts Pompeo over pipeline threat.
Holy smokes! We didn’t see this one coming. Just yesterday MDN brought you the second-quarter update from Montage Resources (see 
Democrat governors across the country are now mimicking the example set by the dictator of New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo abuses state power to reject fossil fuel projects (unconstitutional in our opinion), telling NY’s state environmental agency to reject all new pipelines. Roy Cooper, governor of North Carolina, is the latest Cuomo wannabe. Cooper instructed his state’s environmental agency, the Dept. of Environmental Quality (DEQ), to reject permits for Equitrans’ proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) Southgate project. Which the DEQ did yesterday. The agency tried to disguise the rejection using lame excuses, but the reason for the rejection was politics, plain and simple.
Underground horizontal directional drilling (HDD) for the Mariner East 2 pipelines (two of them, 2 and 2X) have a history of springing leaks. They’re called “inadvertent returns”–when you drill horizontally underground for a pipeline and the drilling mud you put down the hole pops up in a place it’s not supposed to. The good news is that the drilling mud is non-toxic, the same stuff used in toothpaste. The bad news is that it can overwhelm little fishies and other aquatic life and kill (suffocate) them. ME2X drilling had another such incident earlier this week–in Chester County, PA.
In June, Antero Resources, one of the biggest (and best) Marcellus/Utica pure play drillers concentrating most of their drilling in West Virginia, sold an overriding royalty interest (ORRI) in all of their wells for $402 million (see 
Our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), is singing a different tune than it did less than two months ago. In late June, EIA published a post discussing the drastic drop in U.S. LNG (liquefied natural gas) exports, saying a recovery to pre-COVID levels would not happen until sometime next year (see 
Permits to drill new shale wells in the Keystone State (Pennsylvania) remain brisk. Two weeks ago PA issued 32 new permits. Last week PA issued another 30 permits. That’s 62 new permits in two weeks! Ohio issued no new shale drilling permits last week (disappointingly), and West Virginia issued six new permits last week.
Montage Resources, the new name for the merger of Eclipse Resources with Blue Ridge Mountain Resources which happened more than a year ago, issued its second-quarter 2020 update last week. Production for Montage in the Marcellus/Utica was up slightly (3%), to 551.7 MMcfe/d in 2Q. Profits, on the other hand, were way down. The company lost $68.9 million in 2Q20 versus making a $27.5 million profit in 2Q19. Low prices for natgas explain why.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) granted permission to Kinder Morgan to begin service on train #10 at KM’s Elba Island LNG export facility, located near Savannah, Georgia. KM’s Elba project consists of 10 mini-trains, each capable of liquefying 0.3 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) of LNG–or roughly 40 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of natural gas. There’s just one train left to bring online…
