Energy Stories of Interest: Mon, Feb 25, 2019
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Pennsylvania shale production up, led by Washington County; Tenaska garners accolades for South Huntingdon power plant; DEP issues water quality certification for UGI LNG truck loading facility in Berks; Delmarva Power eyes liquefied natural gas storage facility; Enviros can’t block permits for $2B Nexus project: 6th Circ.; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Exxon brings in Microsoft’s cloud platform to fire up shale oil output in Texas; More New England natural gas pipelines needed, but unlikely; NATIONAL: Frackers face harsh reality as Wall Street backs away; Natural gas: production is still too high; The oil and gas situation: is a train wreck around the corner?; INTERNATIONAL: Moscow and Beijing discuss natural gas megaproject.
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The latest edition of the MDN Weekly Digest is now ready. The digest is the meat and “essence” of each story for all posts appearing on the MDN website during the past week, collected in a single PDF document capable of being downloaded and printed. The Weekly Digest is available to paying subscribers only as part of your 
Antero Resources, one of the biggest drillers in the Marcellus/Utica region (focused on wet gas drilling), released its full year and fourth quarter 2018 update last week. The company reports 2018 daily gas equivalent production averaged a record 2.7 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d)–up 20% over 2017. 4Q18 production averaged 3.2 Bcf/d, up 37% over 4Q17 (and up 18% from 4Q18). However, the company’s financial performance wasn’t as stellar.
Earlier this week Energy Transfer, the company that built the Rover Pipeline in Ohio, the Revolution Pipeline in southwestern Pennsylvania, and the Mariner East pipelines that run from eastern OH clear across PA to Philadelphia, issued its fourth quarter and full year 2018 update. The thing that caught our attention is an admission by ET’s CEO Kelcy Warren that the company has made “mistakes” with its pipeline projects in PA, and has learned from those mistakes.
From time to time we check in on Epsilon Energy, which concentrates most of its effort on the Marcellus in Susquehanna County, PA. The former Canadian company decided to “domesticate” itself, moving headquarters from Canada to Houston, TX last summer (see 
US Methanol broke ground in September 2017 in Institute (Kanawha County), WV to build its very first methanol production plant (see 
Natural gas storage fields are an important, but often overlooked, part of the natgas ecosystem. Equitrans (nee EQT Midstream) owns a natgas storage field in Greene County, PA, in the southwest corner of the state. The state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) is threatening to shut down that storage field, because of coal mining in the area.
Now that the reality has begun to sink in that there will be no magic bullet, no magic wand waved to prevent Consolidated Edison from refusing to add new customers (like hotels, apartment buildings, etc.) to its natural gas distribution system in Westchester County, NY, politicians and business leaders in the county are beginning to soil themselves. Certainly metaphorically–maybe literally.
On Tuesday we brought you an update about New Fortress Energy’s LNG plant planned for Wylausing (Bradford County), PA (see 
CNX was fracking their Shaw 1G Utica well in Washington Township (Westmoreland County) on Saturday, Jan. 26, when they detected “a strong drop in pressure” and stopped fracking (see 
Williams is in the process of conducting open houses for a series of compressor station projects part of it’s recently announced Leidy South Project. The project will expand capacity along the Transco Pipeline system, including the newly minted Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline portion of Transco, adding another 582 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of capacity to the Transco in northeast PA.
A single township in Washington County, PA, Smith Township, is home to two “sprawling” shale gas complexes that process and separate Marcellus/Utica gas extracted in southwestern Pennsylvania. One is MarkWest Energy’s Harmon Creek complex, and the other Energy Transfer’s Revolution complex. Area residents think they have quite enough infrastructure and are asking town officials to throttle back new development.