NY Corruption: Home Rule OK to Ban Fracking, but Not Ban Windmills
There is a double standard in existence in New York. A CORRUPT double standard. And the corruption comes from Andrew Cuomo. In 2014 judges on NY’s highest court, the Court of Appeals (all them appointed by the governor) voted to uphold a disastrous energy policy that grants town boards of local municipalities the right to ban fracking, should the state ever allow it, in an entire community (see Shale Drilling in NY is Over – High Court Upholds Town Bans). BUT, when a local town baned wind farms in Western NY, Cuomo stepped in and like the tin horn dictator he is, he overruled them (see NY’s Grotesque Energy Double Standard re “Home Rule”). CORRUPT! It’s happening again–this time in MDN’s own back yard.
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MDN editor Jim Willis had the pleasure of attending yesterday’s S&P Global Platts “Global Energy Outlook Forum” yesterday in New York City. Each year Platts hosts this event, assembling some of the best thinkers and industry participants from across all energy sectors to discuss what happened during the previous year, and what’s on the way next year and down the road with respect to energy. All kinds of energy.
If there is one defining characteristic of a truly conservative Republican, it is that he or she does not like higher taxes. On anything. Conservatives know that higher taxes equal less freedom of individual choice. And higher taxes feed (and perpetuate) the bureaucratic Big Government machine. A lower taxes philosophy is baked into the true conservative’s DNA. Yet a group of brainwashed college students professing to be Republican and conservative (they’re neither) has just launched a group called Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends to lobby for an insane carbon tax.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Nine well permits issued by ODNR; NATIONAL: Continental Resources announces Harold Hamm is stepping up to Executive Chairman; NGI 2020: U.S. drilling ban on E&P radar ahead of 2020 election; Enverus forecasts “significant slowdown” in US gas output growth in 2020; Natural gas boom fizzles as a U.S. glut sinks profits; Chevron’s charge points to billions more in U.S. gas writedowns; The great electric car ‘zero emissions’ boondoggle; INTERNATIONAL: Creating the OPEC of natural gas.
In a bombshell announcement yesterday, Chevron said it is writing down (reducing the paper value) of all its shale assets by $10-$11 billion in the fourth quarter. “More than half” of it is a write-down of its Marcellus/Utica assets. Not only that, but Chevron says it is “evaluating its strategic alternatives for these assets, including divestment.” Translation: Chevron has put its M-U assets, all of them (over 
Antero Resources is working hard to get the company on sound financial footing. That’s the message we took away from an announcement on Monday from the company that says (a) they’ve asked for and received a break in midstream (pipeline) prices from their own subsidiary, Antero Midstream, and (b) they’re putting some of their considerable Marcellus/Utica assets up for sale, hoping to raise upward of $1 billion.
As it turns out, Exxon didn’t know. You may recall the hue and cry from radical anti-fossil fuelers that #ExxonKnew–knew they were toasting mom earth by extracting and encouraging the burning of oil and natural gas. The New Attorney General’s office launched an investigation, and then a lawsuit, charging the same thing. The NY AG claimed Exxon had defrauded shareholders by covering up knowledge of global warming. The first lawsuit to go to trial against Exxon for causing global warming was in NY, where the AG (Letitia “Tish” James) headed up a disaster of a lawsuit. She (and her office) was thoroughly and completely humiliated by a NY judge who said she never proved anything. Her team’s performance was worse than that of a first-year law student.
In a new report titled “Getting Greener: Cost-Effective Options for Achieving New York State’s Greenhouse Gas Goals,” the Citizens Budget Commission (of New York) attributes the 13% greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions drop New York State saw between 1990 and 2016 to an increased usage of natural gas and nuclear power. According to the nonpartisan Commission, New York is “already green” and if it wants to stay that way, it needs MORE natural gas, not less!
The National Whistleblower Center (NWC), a corrupt and partisan (Democrat) nonprofit group, has laughingly launched what it calls a “Climate Corruption Campaign” to “enlist whistleblowers in the fight against fraud and other crimes in the three industry sectors responsible for the vast majority of the world’s carbon pollution: oil and gas, coal, and industrial logging.” What a sick joke.
The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday refused to hear a case that challenged a ruling in the Hoopa Valley Indian Tribe case–a ruling/case that has HUGE implications for Williams’ Constitution Pipeline running through New York State. The Supreme Court rejection is a crushing defeat for Big Green groups Trout Unlimited and California Trout, and very good news for the Constitution project.
Williams, the pipeline giant, held its annual analyst day in New York City last Friday. The company’s top brass was there to wow and woo investors with the company’s plans for 2020 and beyond. In reading about the session, we picked up on some startling statistics. Stats like Williams now provides 30% of all LNG feed gas in the U.S. And most of that (all of it?) comes from the Marcellus/Utica.
The rig count in the Marcellus/Utica region is crashing–down to its lowest level for a December since the M-U became a “thing.” It’s now lower than the levels reached in 2014, which was the advent of the first “crash” in rig counts. BUT (and this is a big BUT), lower rig counts do not necessarily mean less drilling or less production. How can that be?
Dominion Energy’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) previously filed a request with the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that judicially creates a new law stipulating pipelines can’t cross under the Appalachian Trail without (no kidding) an Act of Congress. The clown judges of the Fourth Circus (our name for that court) revoked a permit issued by the U.S. Forest Service. A list of 21 business and oil/gas industry groups filed a “friend of the court” brief yesterday supporting ACP, asking the Supremes to reinstate the Forest Service permit for the project.