Will Chevron Dump its M-U Assets to Chase Permian Black Gold?
A week ago MDN brought you the news that Chevron has cut a $50 billion deal to buy Anadarko Petroleum (see Permian Love Story: Chevron Buying Anadarko in $50B Megamerger). Although Chevron will benefit in a number of ways from the transaction, as we indicated in the headline, the primary motivator is to gain valuable acreage in the oily Permian Basin of West Texas. The question now becomes, will Chevron hold on to its Marcellus/Utica assets? Or sell them in order to concentrate on the Permian?
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West Virginia’s Republican Attorney General, Mac Warner, for some reason is suing the Shale Energy Alliance (SEA), claiming the group (a non-profit) is withholding a list of donor’s names that should be made publicly available. SEA engaged in “electioneering” according to Warner’s office, by paying for ads supporting certain candidates in the 2018 election. Yet Warner’s office isn’t going after non-profit Big Green groups that are doing the same thing. Why not?
Maybe it’s time to let Ithaca just go dark. Turn the electricity off, or rather, let the plants producing electricity that helps power the college town die off, and let rolling blackouts commence across the region. The battle continues to rage in the lib Dem socialist utopia of Ithaca (Tompkins County), NY over a plan to convert a local coal-fired electric generating plant to use much better-for-the-environment and far-less-polluting natural gas. Yet local antis, who irrationally (and we mean clinically insane) hate fossil fuels, continue to object. Fine. Turn off the lights.
Last Thursday, “more than 300” anti-fossil fuel nutters protested to “demand” that Gov. Cuomo block Williams’ proposed Northeast Supply Expansion (NESE) pipeline project. We have extensively covered NESE and the coming decision by Cuomo’s lapdogs at the Dept. of Environmental Conservation.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: PA Sen. Gene Yaw critical of Energy Transfer at industry event; False alarm – no leak in Sunoco pipeline near Philadelphia; FirstEnergy’s supposed ‘green new deal’ to bail out nuclear plants is really just a political deal; Columbia Gas employees celebrate Earth Day with cleanup in Beaver County; ODNR issues 13 permits in Utica Shale; Gov. Tom Wolf visits Marietta in long-shot push for tax on natural gas drillers; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Port Arthur LNG given green light to start construction; FERC approves Driftwood LNG construction; The Permian-driven shale boom is slowing, and that’s OK; NATIONAL: Elizabeth Warren’s green mistake; DLA awards natural gas supply contracts to four firms; U.S. oil, natural gas prices racing in opposite directions; Why are natural gas prices crashing?; INTERNATIONAL: Cuadrilla ‘ready to frack’ at second well in Lancashire as pressure on embattled industry builds; Qatar Petroleum issues 100 LNG carriers build invite; Russia and China close to deal on ‘very big’ Arctic projects that would move natural gas.
As we have in previous years, MDN will not publish today (Friday) in observance of Good Friday and the Easter holiday. We hope you enjoy this blessed time of year!
Kinder Morgan has left a string of broken promises about the date for which the first Elba Island (Georgia) LNG export plant “mini-train” will begin producing and shipping LNG. We’ve chronicled the journey extensively. A month ago KM announced it was once again pushing back the startup of the first mini-train to April, “because of construction delays” (see 
A group of 22 anti-fossil fuel Democrat legislators from North Carolina’s Senate and House have sent a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) asking FERC to cancel Dominion Energy’s 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) project–because they don’t like it. The “legislators,” if you can call them that, claim their fantasy renewables will provide all the energy everybody needs. They’re living in La La Land.
We’ve been keeping an eye on natural gas supplies coming out of the ground in the Permian (West Texas and eastern New Mexico) for more than a year. Why? Because all that associated gas being produced in the Permian has to go somewhere, and increasingly it goes to places where Marcellus/Utica gas also goes. A potent competitor. A year ago we told you about Permian and M-U gas competing in Midwestern markets (see 
MDN is not a blog/news site about climate change per se, and we don’t want to turn it into one. However, the issue of climate change, by which we mean man-caused global warming from burning fossil fuels, is at the core of why antis oppose shale drilling. So every now and again we bring you articles about the larger issue of global warming, and (more recently) about the idiotic Green New Deal being peddled by Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and New York Rep. Alexandria Occasional-Cortex. The Wall Street Journal has just published a stellar column with four reasons why you don’t have to worry yourself into a frenzy that carbon dioxide emissions are going up.
Swamp dwellers are recoiling in horror that the Pennsylvania House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee has just approved a series of bills that restores some sanity in how environmental regulations are made and paid for in the Keystone State. The bills begin, in a small way, to take back control of our system of creating laws, returning authority for making laws to the PA legislature, instead of creating and forcing laws on citizens by unelected, nameless, faceless, swamp-dwelling bureaucrats in regulatory agencies like the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). Let us explain.