Range Resources 1Q19 – Happy ME1 is Finally Back Online
Range Resources issued its first quarter 2019 update earlier this week. Natural gas liquids (NGLs) were one of the themes of the update and analyst phone call–and no wonder why. The company produced an average of 2.26 billion cubic feet equivalent per day (Bcfe/d) of natural gas in 1Q19, nearly one-third (31%) of which was NGLs. Ethane and propane, getting them to market, is a major focus for Range.
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Yesterday the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Policy Committee held a hearing in Pittsburgh, supposedly on strategies for combating mythical man-made global warming by reducing methane gas emissions. It reality it was an anti-shale crapfest, complete with speeches by radicals from PennFuture and the Environmental Defense Fund.
In March a group of Pennsylvania landowners from Lancaster County asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case in which they say they’ve been screwed over by Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline, that the pipeline should not have had the right to use eminent domain to build the pipeline before the matter of compensation was fully adjudicated (see 
Middletown, NJ officials recently passed, unanimously, a resolution opposing the proposed construction of the Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline, part of the Transco pipeline system. There are a number of components to NESE, but the key component, the heart of the project, is a new 23-mile pipeline from the shore of New Jersey into (on the bottom of) the Raritan Bay–running parallel to the existing Transco pipeline–before connecting to the Transco offshore. Comments by Middletown Mayor Tony Perry are instructive and provide us with a teachable moment.
President Trump is “seriously considering” granting an exemption to the Jones Act, a federal law passed in 1920 that that regulates maritime commerce in the United States. This is seriously good news for the Marcellus/Utica, in fact for every shale play in the U.S. Why? How? Let us explain…
Are underground shale wastewater pipelines the “next big thing” for the Pennsylvania midstream (i.e. pipeline) industry? According to Thomas Karam, CEO of Equitrans Midstream Corp. (formerly EQT Midstream), they just may be. Most of Equitrans’ pipeline business is flowing natural gas. A little bit of their business is dedicated to flowing wastewater. Karam wants to grow that little bit into a much bigger bit.
Bechtel, a huge multi-national engineering firm, is the company building the mighty Shell ethane cracker in Monaca, PA. Shell won’t divulge when they think the cracker will be up and running (still a year or more away), but in what we consider a very good sign that the cracker will be operating sooner rather than later, Shell has just awarded another huge multi-national engineering firm, AECOM, the contract to maintain all the machinery at the cracker plant once it’s built and running.
In August 2017 Range Resources and the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) officially settled alleged methane migration from a well Range drilled in 2011 in Lycoming County, PA (see 
Williams is planning to build two new compressor stations in eastern Pennsylvania as part of its Leidy South Project (see 
We continue to be disturbed by the double standard and (we maintain) lawless behavior of the Attorneys General in both New York State and Massachusetts. Both AGs have colluded with Big Green groups in a scheme to shake down ExxonMobil, and both are doing their best to cover up their collusion. We told you in 2016 of the AGs’ refusal to comply with subpoena issued by Congress for copies of their communication records (see 
Last week the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) released its annual State of the Markets report–for 2018. The report summarizes FERC’s assessment of natural gas, electric, and other energy market developments during the past year. The revelation (for us) coming from the report was in reading that although the U.S. had record high natural gas production and demand last year (from electric generation and LNG exports), the growth in demand for natgas outpaced the growth in production.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Senate Enviro Committee to consider renominations of McDonnell (DEP), Dunn (DCNR); Pennsylvania utility regulator speaks out against state Senate’s nuclear bailout bill; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: ‘Ramifications for gas markets’ as nuclear subsidies approved in New Jersey; NATIONAL: Celebrate Fossil Fuel Appreciation Day; U.S. shale DUC wells: Time bombs waiting to go off on OPEC?; Amid the furor of the Green New Deal, don’t overlook the shale revolution; Elizabeth Warren has a lot of bad ideas, but her anti-drilling plan might be the worst; TruStar CNG fueling milestone underscores ‘success story’ of natural gas; U.S. exports transform NGL markets; Unreliable nature of solar and wind makes electricity much more expensive, major new study finds; Pulitzer Prize administrator defends process after prize goes to board member’s wife; INTERNATIONAL: ExxonMobil agrees 20-year LNG deal with China’s Zhejiang Energy.
Since January 20, all of Sunoco Logistics’ Mariner East 1 (ME1) pipeline has been shut down on the orders of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (see 
This stuff continues to make us angry. In March we told you that MacAllister Machinery Co. Inc. of Michigan used lawyers to serve landowners in Lancaster County, PA with “mechanic’s liens” making the landowners liable to pay money to MacAllister for work done on the Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline project (see