New Fortress Energy Signs Long-Term LNG Export Agreement
New Fortress Energy, which funds and builds LNG (liquefied natural gas) infrastructure to “help accelerate the world’s transition to clean energy,” yesterday announced it has signed a 10-year supply agreement for the purchase of 27.5 million MMBtu per annum of LNG (approximately 8 cargoes a year) to an unnamed buyer at a price indexed to Henry Hub–through January 2030. The announcement does not contain details about who the buyer may be, or what the actual price is they will receive–but we have some speculation about all that.
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Nearly two weeks ago CNX Resources issued its fourth quarter and full-year 2019 update (see 
Gasmageddon, as this current low natural gas price climate is being called, is getting worse. Based on the latest weather models (the natgas market has some of the best long-range weather forecasting in the world), gas prices have crashed and are burning (pun intended). Yesterday the NYMEX futures price closed at $1.77–in the dead of winter! Spot prices for gas bought and sold in the northeast lead the loss in value. A Raymond James survey of energy executives found most execs believe we will exit 2020 with the price of gas in the $1.50-$2.00 range, and that gas will not go above an average of $2.50 this year. Although we now use 50% more natgas than just 10 years ago, prices remain stubbornly low. Why?
American Energy Partners, Inc. (AEPT), based in Allentown, PA, has just added a fifth subsidiary/division to the company. AEPT agreed to acquire 100% of the membership units of Oilfield Basics, LLC in exchange for 1,000,000 shares of American Energy’s common shares. Oilfield Basics is an educational company, providing courses and training in the oil and gas space. It’s an interesting addition to a portfolio of companies that includes drilling, remediation, water, and valuation services.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s Santa Claus routine is wearing thin. As he has done year after year with his annual proposed budgets, Wolf once again is calling for a massive tax increase of $4.5 billion, assessed solely on the Marcellus Shale industry, in order to fund a panoply of projects (see 
Yesterday MDN brought you news about Democrat trade union members in Pennsylvania turning on one of their own–Gov. Tom Wolf (see 
The sale of the bankrupt former Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) refinery has officially become a soap opera. Last June a series of explosions and a massive fire at the facility, the East Coast’s oldest and largest oil refinery, closed it down (see 
If you add up all of the forms of energy used by the U.S.–electric power generation, transportation, home and business heating and cooling, etc.–and you measure the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) all of that energy usage pumps into earth’s precious atmosphere, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says the CO2 we will pump out in 2050 will be 4% LESS than what we pumped out in 2019. And that’s with continued heavy use of fossil fuels. Which exposes the lie that we must dump the use of fossil fuels now, certainly by 2050, or we’ll all die from high temperatures.
It amazes us that we now have to defend perhaps the greatest advancement to the longevity of not only humankind but all species on planet earth. That advancement is PLASTICS. Yes, plastics. The invention of plastic and its uses on Mom Earth has made our lives better. Plastics, contrary to the current popular mythology, have extended human and animal life. And yet, even the companies that build giant cracker plants to create raw plastic pellets (for further use in thousands of plastic products) must now bow down before environmental crackpots to declare their concern (even dislike) of the very thing they produce: plastic. It’s bizarre.
We’re now a couple of months shy of the fifth anniversary for when PTT first announced they would consider building an ethane cracker plant in Ohio (see 
In December 2018, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that so-called “stripper wells” (low-producing wells) can be taxed under the 2012 Act 13 law, slapped with an impact tax assessment if those wells produce more than 90 thousand cubic feet per day (Mcf/d) of gas in a single month, any month (see 
New Fortress Energy plans to build a $96 million, 1,600-foot-long pier and storage facility on the Delaware River (Gloucester County, NJ) to be used for docking and loading two ships at a time with LNG. The LNG will be manufactured at a plant in landlocked Bradford County, PA and shipped to the NJ facility via rail (see 
While we’re sure he means well, Congressman David McKinley, a professional engineer (P.E.) from West Virginia (Republican) has thrown his support behind a “bipartisan” effort to create a new federal bureaucracy to oversee the decarbonization of the power generation sector. In other words, an effort that will end the use of natural gas to generate electricity–by 2050. We just can’t support something like that. It’s short-sighted, heavy-handed, and creating a new federal bureaucracy simply goes in the wrong direction. Period.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Ohio shale gas permits slow in the face weak gas prices; Protect PT to host workshop against fracking; Chesapeake Energy requests waiver on setback to drill well in Bradford County; Why Pa.’s public pension funds have millions of dollars of your money tied up in the natural gas industry; NATIONAL: Could the flight shaming movement take off in the U.S.? JetBlue thinks so.; Alternative energy can’t replace hydrocarbons; Unlike in Europe, the US approach to climate change is actually working; A climate blacklist that works: “It should make her unhirable in academia”; INTERNATIONAL: Power and natural gas roil energy shift: what to know at E-World; Oil prices could fall much further as Russia refuses additional production cuts.