National Grid: Long Island, NYC Heading for NatGas Shortage, Soon
New York City’s CBS affiliate WLNY Channel 2 recently got a sit-down interview with National Grid President John Bruckner to discuss the company’s moratorium on new gas hook-ups, to grill Bruckner on whether or not there really is a gas shortage in the region. Bruckner handled the adversarial interview well, telling the reporter that yes, there really is a shortage. Currently there is a shortage between supply and demand–to the tune of 10,000 homes. Bruckner said if there’s a serious cold snap this winter, Long Island and parts of NYC served by National Grid will experience a service outage–a natural gas blackout, if you will. It’s a scary prospect.
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Here we go again. Not only does Boston and New England now depend on Russian LNG, so too does U.S. territory Puerto Rico (PR)–thanks to a century-old law that prevents the U.S. from shipping LNG to our own states and territories! It’s bizarre and must stop. The closest LNG export facility to PR is Kinder Morgan’s Elba Island, Georgia facility, which recently came online (see 
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Kinder Morgan to bring 9 Elba Island LNG units into service by first half of 2020; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Gulf Coast supply, demand growth puts natural gas pipeline grid at risk; Gov. Gavin Newsom signs bill limiting oil and gas development; NATIONAL: Natural gas industry urged to advance ‘positive message’ to ensure pipelines; A draconian crackdown looms over natural gas; E&Ps’ performance belies negative investor sentiment.
Leave it to ace reporter Paul Gough from the Pittsburgh Business Times to unearth some earth-shattering news–that ExxonMobil is actively looking at locations in Beaver County, Pennsylvania to potentially build a second multi-billion dollar cracker plant. Shell is already well along in building the region’s first ethane cracker–in Monaca (Beaver County). Will lightning strike twice for the good citizens of Beaver County? Maybe!
The “bad old days” of low low prices for natural gas have returned to the Marcellus/Utica region–at least temporarily. During the past few weeks natural gas prices at Appalachian supply hubs Dominion South and Tennessee Zone 4 Marcellus fell from about $2 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) in mid-September to lows of 76¢/MMBtu and 65¢/MMBtu, respectively, on October 4. Ouch. Why the drop-like-a-rock in price? For a variety of reasons, but there are two main factors…
According to the EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration, our favorite government agency), in the coming month of November, the U.S.’s seven major shale plays will produce a combined 84 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of natural gas, and 8.9 million barrels of oil per day–a brand new record high for each. The real eye-opener is that while the M-U will produce 132 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of additional shale gas, the Permian Basin in West Texas and New Mexico will produce an additional 210 MMcf/d of shale gas!
Mountaineer Gas it close to completing Phase One of its Eastern Panhandle Expansion project in West Virginia, a 22.5-mile, 10-inch-diameter steel pipeline from Morgan County to Berkeley County. The project is designed to deliver Marcellus/Utica natural gas via local distribution channels to a new $150 million industrial facility in Berkeley County, WV, and to provide “a redundant supply” of gas to some 6,000 local businesses and residents in the Tri-State area. The system is supposed to be fed by a short 3.5-mile pipeline from Columbia Gas running under the Potomac River from Maryland into WV.
Sam Thigpen, founder and CEO of Thigpen Solutions, revealed something at Gulf Coast Energy Forum in New Orleans that is a revelation for us. Starting last winter, Thigpen and his Texas-based company has been shipping LNG to National Grid and their Long Island, NY operation during the wintertime, so that National Grid doesn’t run out of gas for its existing customers. In fact, Thigpen has a five-year contract to supply National Grid’s Long Island customers with (expensive) LNG.
For residents who want to build a new home or business in either Northampton or Easthampton (Hampshire County), Massachusetts, and connect to natural gas supplies–you can forget about it. Columbia Gas of Massachusetts has announced that a moratorium on new natural gas customers in those two municipalities, in place since 2015, will become permanent. Citing “cost impacts and benefits” to customers, Columbia’s president says the company will no longer build what it called the “alternate backfeed” pipeline project–a 6-mile pipe that would have run between Agawam and Holyoke to supply Northampton and Easthampton.
In August, Enterprise Products Partners, the builder and operator of the Appalachia-to-Texas Express (ATEX) ethane pipeline, launched an open season to gauge interest in expanding the capacity along the 1,192-mile pipeline (see 
Sounding like North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Friday “ordered” National Grid to connect 1,157 new natural gas customers previously denied service because National Grid won’t have enough natural gas on the coldest days in winter to service everyone. New York has descended into a police state, with our Dear Leader ordering around companies in contravention of established law. Yet not a peep from mainstream news organizations about Cuomo’s excessive abuse of power.
We’ve seen this movie before. The radical fringe leftists from the Sierra Club (disgusting organization) convinced the clown judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (i.e. Circus) to block construction of Dominion Energy’s 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) pipeline by getting the court to toss U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permits that allow the project to kill a couple of bats along a few miles of the project (see 
How would you like to find out that your billion dollar pipeline project has just been denied another permit–by getting a tweet? That’s what happened to PennEast Pipeline on Friday. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy tweeted that NJ’s Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) is, once again, denying a federal Clean Water Act Section 401 stream crossing permit for the project. The putz delivered the news to PennEast via a tweet–can you believe that? The NJ DEP is rejecting the permit not for any scientific reasons, which is what the law stipulates, but because of politics.