Va. Bill Would Block Atlantic Coast Pipe from Passing Along Costs

Virginia House of Delegates member Lee Ware, a Republican, has “quietly” introduced a bill in the General Assembly that would block Dominion Energy, builder of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP), from passing along costs related to the pipeline to the electric generating plants and their ratepayers that will use the cheap natural gas made available by the pipeline.
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The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) office of enforcement is close to launching a new audit policy “that will offer significant new penalty reductions for the oil and gas industry.” That’s how the news is being spun–that oil and gas are about to get a big, fat, wet, sloppy kiss from the EPA. The truth is far different from the media spin.
As we have noted recently in a number of posts, it appears we’re heading into a dip of drilling activity–not only in the oil plays but also here at home in the Marcellus/Utica (see
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Dominion Energy awards $50,000 to organizations inspiring arts and culture; Dinniman blasts pipeline lobbying as he does it with taxpayer money; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Polar Vortex sets US Midwest demand record, raises risk of wellhead freeze-offs; Commissioning cited as reason for recent feedgas levels at Cheniere LNG terminal in Texas; Eugene council discusses natural gas regulation; Hays County, TX residents say they’re ‘prepared to fight’ planned natural gas pipeline; NATIONAL: Record cold forces rethink on global warming.

Equitrans’ (EQT Midstream) 300-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) is now 70% built (see 
MDN previously reported on efforts in both Ohio and Pennsylvania to plug orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells (all of them conventional/vertical wells), which present a health and safety issue. It’s all too easy to hit one of these old wells when drilling a new horizontal shale well. In WV, a new effort to plug old wells is causing concern for some–that the effort to plug old wells may inflict economic damage on WV counties. Huh?!
It seems the rather thick-headed governors from New England have finally woken up and understand their resistance to new natural gas pipelines has placed them in a pickle. The region, when it gets really cold (like over the next few days), gets really short on natural gas. Prices soar, supplies diminish, and people not only pay high natgas prices, but high prices for electricity, which gets generated by natgas. The govs have a plan to slap a Band Aid on the problem.
Baker Hughes, a GE Company (a company GE is trying to dump) is holding its annual meeting in Florence, Italy. Must be nice to work for BH! At the meeting BH made a big production of announcing they intend to reduce their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 50% by 2030, and 100% by 2050. Fat chance.
How is it not child abuse to brainwash young kids with your particular brand of sick environmental radicalism? That’s apparently what THE Delaware Riverkeeper herself has done–brainwashed little kids.
This post is about a pipeline project we’ve written quite a bit about over the past few years–Dominion Energy’s New Market project that ever-so-modestly expands an existing pipeline in Upstate New York. But at its heart, the issue is much deeper. Anti-fossil fuel radicals are challenging this project, in court, as a way to force the government to consider man-made global warming when approving such projects.