Empire Energy Continues to Hold Marc/Utica Acreage in NY State
Every now and again we like to check in on a company that continues to keep the faith with respect to shale drilling in New York State. Empire Energy, according to its website, owns “large scale shale acreage” in the Marcellus, Utica and Bakken. Most of Empire’s Marcellus/Utica shale acreage is in New York State–where shale drilling is (so far) not allowed. According to a recent press release, Empire continues to hold its NY shale acreage “at minimal cost.”
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The hits keep coming from OOGEEP, the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program. In May we brought you OOGEEP’s top notch new resource to help workers discover new careers in the oil and gas industry (see 
Last week MDN published a post from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (based on EIA data) that points out worldwide energy use over the next 30 years will increase another 50%, and most of it will still be provided by (yep), fossil fuels (see 
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Letter: Time to get Atlantic Coast Pipeline project moving again; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: New identity for BP in the shale fields; Port trucking company replaces diesel with natural gas trucks; Is the Permian natural gas price rally real?; NATIONAL: Lower 48 E&P bankruptcies not ‘epidemic,’ says Rystad; Shale boom is slowing just when the world needs oil most; Trump’s four biggest secrets are the economy; INTERNATIONAL: Extinction Rebellion funded by rich trust-funders and special interests; First export cargo from Freeport LNG nears UAE port; New IPCC report on ocean warming cites a flawed and retracted paper.
Here we go again. “Activist investor” Elliott Management is pressuring Marathon Petroleum to split itself up into three companies–retail (Speedway convenience store chain), refining, and midstream (or MarkWest Energy). Recall that Marathon bought out and merged in MarkWest just a few years ago, in December 2015 (see 
Last December Williams announced its Leidy South Project, a new expansion of the Transco pipeline in Pennsylvania (see 
Sunoco Logistics Partners, a subsidiary of Energy Transfer, is still on the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environment Protection’s (DEP) naughty list. In February, PA Gov. Tom Wolf ordered the DEP to suspend all reviews of clean water permit applications and other pending approvals for ALL of ET/Sunoco’s pipeline projects in the state–including the Mariner East and Revolution pipeline projects. The ban on approving reviews has not yet been lifted and means that in 33 locations across the state (most of them in the Philadelphia area) Sunoco can’t complete underground horizontal direction drilling (HDD) work for its Mariner East pipeline projects.
The Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA) is calling attention to the “great untold story” in Ohio and across the nation, a story intentionally ignored over the past week of faux climate change protests by kids playing hooky from school. What is the untold story? That the United States in general, and Ohio in particular, is “leading the world in environmental stewardship and emission reduction.” How? Because of shale energy–specifically because of shale gas.
Not everyone who lives in the Greater New York City area is falling for the bogus line by Gov. Andrew Cuomo that he’s not to blame for a natural gas shortage plaguing the region. As we’ve chronicled, endlessly, Cuomo ordered his Dept. of Environment Conservation to reject the Williams Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline project (see 
Last September MDN reported that Southwestern Energy was the very first driller to earn the label of producing “responsible gas” from the Independent Energy Standards Corporation (IES)–what they call their TrustWell™ Responsible Gas Program certification (see 
Here’s a story that slipped under our radar for the past few months, but is now out in the open for all to see. In June Blue Racer Midstream, a gathering and processing system with 700 miles of pipelines in Ohio and West Virginia in the “heart” of the Marcellus/Utica, began the process to file for an initial public offering (IPO)–to become a publicly traded company. Blue Racer hopes to raise $600-$750 million with an IPO, money to expand. Midstream giant Williams, which owns roughly 29% of Blue Racer, sued in July to block the IPO.
Most of the drama surrounding Williams’ Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline project has centered on New York State and its corrupt Governor, Andrew Cuomo, who denied a federal Clean Water Act Section 401 water crossing permit for the project (see