Bankrupt Phila. Refinery Owners Want Cheaper Sale – Why?
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 Massive Explosion, Fire at Philadelphia Refinery). In pretty short order PES, which was already struggling financially, filed for bankruptcy. In January PES cut a deal to sell the site to a warehouse developer from Chicago (see Philadelphia Energy Solutions Oil Refinery Permanently Closed). The deal means over 1,000 refinery workers are permanently out of work. Yet there was a higher bid from another party that wants to keep the facility operating as a refinery. So why is PES is pushing the sale to the Chicago developer at a lower price?
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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 
Pennsylvania House Bill (HB) 1100, aimed at attracting new petrochemical investment to the state, was previously passed by the PA House, and last week, by the Senate (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.
Andrew Cuomo’s blockade of important pipeline projects like the Williams Constitution Pipeline (from northeast PA into NY) continues to keep the price of natural gas high in the Empire State. The Constitution, which was supposed to be built years ago, is supposed to connect to two other interstate pipelines, one of them the Iroquois (see 
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has taken the first, very big and important step of approving an environmental assessment (EA) for TC Energy/Columbia Transmission’s Louisiana XPress Project. TC/Columbia filed an application with FERC last July for the project (see 
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf flat out, 100% lied when he introduced his latest annual budget on Tuesday, declaring “it doesn’t raise taxes.” B.S. As he has done for the past six budgets, Wolf once again is calling for a new severance tax on the Marcellus. On top of the existing impact tax (the equivalent of a severance tax). Wolf’s plan calls for a new tax that would steal $4.5 billion out of the pockets of drillers and landowners in order to redistribute their hard-earned wealth to a panoply of others.
Pennsylvania State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, Majority Chair of the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, doesn’t put up with the juvenile antics from the Democrats on his committee–like Danielle Friel Otten and Greg Vitali–from those who violate decorum by pretending they want to ask a question when in fact they want to pontificate like the gasbags they are. Wednesday at a hearing on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), Metcalfe shut down Otten and Vitali when they attempted to violate rules and bloviate instead of asking relevant questions.
A fascinating new study has just been published in the peer-reviewed journal Science of The Total Environment. The new study, titled “Characterizing anecdotal claims of groundwater contamination in shale energy basins,” looks at the perception of landowners who say local fracking activities have impacted (polluted) their water wells–versus reality. The study finds that in most cases the so-called pollution problems of these water wells is (using our own words here) “all in the heads” of the landowners. It’s not real. Fracking, in fact, has NOT caused the pollution of their wells. Researchers studied wells in the Texas Barnett and Eagle Ford, the Louisiana Haynesville, and (yep) the Pennsylvania Marcellus–in Dimock.