MDN Off Today – Veteran’s Day
MDN will not publish today, Veteran’s Day. We thank our veterans for their service and sacrifice.
A quick update on the website: There may still be a few bumps as we are in the process of migrating the entire site to a new hosting plan that gives us a faster server with more space. Please bear with us. We will let you know when that process is complete. Also, MDN editor Jim Willis will attend the MidStream PA 2019 event in State College on Tuesday. We’ll bring you news from the event as the week progresses.
Pittsburgh Business Times ace reporter Paul Gough has done it again–breaking big news related to ExxonMobil and their very active search to locate a site in the Pittsburgh region to build a gigantic ethane cracker plant. This time Paul’s sources are telling him Exxon has widened their search. A few weeks ago we told you Exxon was looking for potential locations in Beaver County, PA, near where Shell is building their $8 billion cracker plant (see 
Speaking of cracker plants and the exciting news that ExxonMobil is very actively searching for a location in the Marcellus/Utica region to build one (see today’s lead story), the fact that Exxon is looking is driving leftist environmental kooks bonkers. They hate the Shell cracker going up in Beaver County, and they want to ensure there are no other such plants built anywhere in the region–or at least in Pennsylvania. The eco-leftists have bullied Pittsburgh’s Mayor Bill Peduto to join their cause, who recently stated in a speech, “I oppose any additional petrochemical companies coming to western Pennsylvania.” The president of the Pennsylvania Chemical Industry Council has responded to Peduto’s inane comments, exposing him for the dunce he is.
West Virginia’s new co-tenancy law is working, according to speakers at the West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association (WVONGA) 2019 Fall Meeting held yesterday and today. Several speakers from major WV drillers, including Antero Resources and CNX Resources, sang the praises of the new co-tenancy law. WVONGA executive director Anne Blankenship also sang its praises, but said there’s still a few things to work out before the new law is “fully understood.”
Energy Transfer (ET), the big pipeline company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, issued its third quarter 2019 update yesterday. ET is the builder of the Rover Pipeline in the Utica Shale, the Mariner East trio of pipelines in the PA Marcellus, and the Revolution gathering system in southwestern PA. With Rover built and fully operational, our interest was in locating information/updates on the ME and Revolution projects. We hit paydirt in yesterday’s update.
We often spot stories in the press about the price of natural gas for end-user customers going down. A utility here and a utility there will announce a rate reduction. Most of the time we don’t bring you those kinds of stories because they’re pretty common. However, we spotted a story that’s different. The Public Service Commission in West Virginia says natural gas utility companies that serve 91% of the gas customers in the state have filed requests to LOWER the rates they charge for their gas–thanks to abundant supplies of Marcellus Shale gas being extracted in the state.
New York’s Attorney General has viciously gone after ExxonMobil in state court hoping to prove the company knew, for years, that burning its oil and gas would lead to so-called man-made global warming and eventually kill the planet. And, says the vicious AG, Exxon covered it up from investors because someday their stock will be worthless when everyone finds out, and they don’t want investors to know about it just yet. The AG is trying to prove the company has engaged in securities fraud.
Even though the oil and gas industry is currently going through another “down” cycle, make no mistake–some of the best and highest paying jobs in the country are still to be found in the fossil fuel industry. We have a list of the top 10 highest paying jobs below. We’ll state right up front they all require an advanced degree–bachelor’s degree or higher. But man oh man, do they pay! In 2018 some 1.5 million people were employed directly in the oil and gas industry, and another 1.2 million are employed in the closely-related power generation industry.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Labor sides with Big Oil in a feud with Pittsburgh’s mayor; City says it wants a role in Philly refinery Ch. 11 sale; New York State writes down value of Tesla plant in Buffalo; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Florida fracking ban bill is a classic government solution in search of a problem; Could an Alaska North Slope LNG project undercut Gulf Coast competitors?; NATIONAL: New natural gas pipelines are adding capacity from the South Central, Northeast regions; NAPE announces new ‘magazine for dealmakers’ to complement expos; U.S. natural gas prices rising toward winter; INTERNATIONAL: Yamal LNG cargo heading for Zeebrugge; Spain becomes Europe’s cheapest gas market on flood of low-cost LNG.
Last week Marathon Petroleum, the parent company of MPLX (formerly called MarkWest Energy) announced some big changes during their third quarter update. Namely, they have caved to “activist” investors (we still call them corporate raiders) and their demands to split the company and dump the current CEO (see 
In 2011 Ohio Gov. John Kasich (RINO) signed into law a provision to create the Ohio Oil and Gas Leasing Commission, a group to oversee drilling and fracking on state-owned land. Then Kasich refused to appoint members to the five-member commission, effectively skirting the law and imposing his own whacked moratorium on drilling on state-owned land. Why? Punishment for the industry refusing to endorse his obscene high severance tax rate. In 2017 under threat by the Republican legislature, Kasich finally relented and appointed the five members (see 
Do Rhode Island regulators read MDN? Maybe! On Monday we brought you a post about the coming natural gas outages like that experienced last January in the People’s Republic of Rhode Island, due to eco-socialist pressure to ban new natural gas infrastructure (see 
Toby Rice, still relatively new in his role of CEO at EQT, spoke about changing the culture at the nation’s largest natural gas-producing company. At a Southpointe CEO Association event yesterday afternoon in Washington County, Rice said, “These past 100 days, I tell everybody, they’re on the happiness campaign, they just don’t know it.” Our summary of his comments: “All Aboard the Happy Train!”
Yesterday MDN brought you news about Chesapeake Energy and their third quarter update (see 
In June 2017, the Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Foundation (PEDF) won a case at the PA Supreme Court by the skin of their teeth (see 
The smart folks at IHS Markit, a global analytics company that tracks data in the oil and gas industry, are predicting a major slowdown in shale oil production in 2020, and essentially no growth in production for 2021. Although this prediction, based on evidence and the intuition of people who study this stuff is about shale oil, the prediction *does* relate to the Marcellus/Utica as well.