Beaver County | Energy Companies | Ethane | Industrywide Issues | Jobs | NGLs | Pennsylvania | Processing Plants | Shell
Shell Stops Adding Workers at Cracker Site After New Virus Cases
When the COVID-19 coronavirus hit, Shell stopped all work on its mighty cracker plant in Beaver County, PA, sending nearly 8,000 workers home in mid-March for what was thought to be “a few days to a few weeks” (see Shell Shuts Down SWPA Cracker Plant Construction re COVID-1). In early May Shell began bringing back 300 workers each week. Roughly 3,500 work on-site now. Because of a spike in new coronavirus cases among workers, Shell has temporarily stopped adding back new workers.
Read More “Shell Stops Adding Workers at Cracker Site After New Virus Cases”
Over the past week, comparing this past Wednesday (Jul 15) with a week ago Wednesday (Jul 8), the Enverus onshore rig count increased by five–from 276 to 281. After four solid months of the rig count going down, perhaps we’ve finally hit bottom, turned a corner, and any other analogy you can think of to indicate better days are ahead.
The wackos at the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) have convinced, bullied and coopted 14 far-left-leaning states plus the District of Columbia to sign a “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) that pledges their states will force tractor-trailers, buses and other large and medium-sized vehicles to be all-electric by 2050–in thirty short years. It’s crackers. It’s cuckoo. It’s not even possible! And it will never happen. But just the threat is enough to inflict economic harm and hardship on working-class folks. We’d even call the NRDC MOU racist.
Multi-billionaire Warren Buffett (with more money than God) is a darling of the Democrat left because he’s a Democrat and often $upports leftist causes. Buffett has even praised crazy Bernie Sanders for championing the little guy. Yet Buffett isn’t ready to give up capitalism the way most of the rest of his party advocates. When it comes to investing and making money, Buffett is betting big on fossil fuels. Less than two weeks ago Buffett finalized a deal to buy all of Dominion Energy’s natural gas pipeline business, including major assets in the Marcellus/Utica (see 
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Royalty owners watching bankruptcy case; NATIONAL: Court blocks Trump effort to rescind Obama-era methane rule; COVID-19 mitigation has delayed construction of some electric generators; How one oil and gas company is innovating its way through the bust; INTERNATIONAL: Global recovery unlikely to be v-shaped, says Shell chief; U.S. threatens new sanctions on Russian gas projects: ‘get out now’.
In January President Trump announced a list of proposed changes to the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in an effort to strip away some of the governmental red tape that has built up over the years like plaque in an artery, preventing important infrastructure projects like pipelines, dams, bridges, and roads from getting built (see 
In April 2019, President Trump signed an Executive Order (EO) instructing the Environmental Protection Agency to review Section 401 of the Clean Water Act–the section that grants states (and tribes) the right to have a say in pipeline projects (see 
Some 12 days ago Dominion Energy announced it is throwing in the towel and canceling the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) project that would have stretched from West Virginia to North Carolina. The company also announced it is selling its pipeline business to Warren Buffett (see 
Rystad Energy, an independent energy research and business intelligence company headquartered in Oslo, Norway (but with major offices in cities including Houston), recently issued their latest assessment of the worldwide oil and gas marketplace. Rystad is predicting the number of oil and gas wells drilled worldwide in 2020 will fall by a staggering 23% from the number drilled last year. Rystad’s prediction models stretch out five years and forecasts over the next five years the number of wells drilled in any given year will *still not* exceed the number of wells drilled in 2019. Yuck.
There were 15 new permits issued in PA for shale drilling July 6-10. There were no new permits issued in OH nor in WV for shale drilling last week, unfortunately. In PA, new permits were issued in Bradford, Lycoming and Susquehanna Counties–in the dry gas northeastern part of the state.
PTT Global Chemical yesterday issued a press release to say its major partner and financial backer for a planned $10 billion ethane cracker facility in Belmont County, OH–South Korea’s Daelim Chemical USA–has decided to pull out of the project. PTT said it remains committed to the project and will look for a new partner.
Yesterday MDN told you the full Pennsylvania State Senate, with an overwhelming bipartisan majority, voted on and passed a bill to grant tax break incentives to huge petrochemical plants willing to build new facilities in PA–facilities that will use Marcellus Shale methane (see 
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!