Energy Transfer Partners & Equity Merging into One Company Today
Energy Transfer is, on paper, several different companies. Energy Transfer Equity (ETE) is the mother ship–the main holding company. Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) is and has been (for us) the main company, builder of Rover Pipeline, among other projects. Nearly two years ago Sunoco Logistics Partners, a subsidiary of ETE, was merged into ETP (see ETE Merging Sunoco Logistics and Energy Transfer Partners). Sunoco, aka ETP, is building the Mariner East 2 NGL pipeline project. Although technically ETP is the builder, we still call the company doing the work Sunoco, because that’s what everyone else does. Confusing! Hopefully that confusion ends today. ETE announced yesterday that following a vote of unitholders (i.e. shareholders), as of today ETE and ETP are merged, and the new name is simply, Energy Transfer.
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Gulfport Energy, an independent oil and gas driller with significant acreage positions in the Utica Shale of eastern Ohio and the SCOOP Woodford and SCOOP Springer plays in Oklahoma, issued its third quarter operational (not financial) update yesterday. Gulfport is one of those companies that delivers its operational news first, and a few weeks later issues its financial news. Gulfport reports production continued to climb to new highs, averaging 1,427.5 million cubic feet equivalent (MMcfe) per day, a 7% increase over 2Q18 and 19% increase over 3Q17. Said another way, 1.43 Bcf/d.
Year after year New England sees historic price spikes and shortages of natural gas during the winter. It got so bad last year that several LNG cargoes from Russia were delivered (see 
Lawyers representing a group of 21 children filed a lawsuit in 2015 that aims to force the end using all fossil fuels in the United States, to address so called man-made global warming (see 
The “best of the rest”–stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading: NY: Winter electricity & natural gas bills expected to remain flat; slight rise possible for natural gas; NEXUS pipeline set to join natural gas traffic jam at Dawn Hub; Virginia Natural Gas celebrates Careers in Energy Week; Methane emissions continue to fall as oil, gas production soars says EPA; EPA aims to triple pace of deregulation in coming year; EIA data show weekly U.S. natural-gas supply above 3 trillion cubic feet; Natural gas pipeline rupture in Canada affects U.S. energy markets; White House shelves coal industry incentives plan; AMLO to suspend Mexico bid rounds until current projects start producing; China stops buying U.S. oil, two months after record total.
The East Coast’s second LNG export plant to come online, after Cove Point in Maryland, will be Elba Island in Georgia. In July, Kinder Morgan, the builder and primary sponsor of the project, pushed back startup for the plant from the third until fourth quarter of this year (see 
In July MDN told you that Dominion Energy had decided, at least unofficially, to abandon a plan to build a compressor station across the Potomac River from Mount Vernon–the home and estate of our illustrious first president, George Washington (see 
Last Friday three county commissioners from Belmont County, OH took a field trip to visit Beaver County, PA, touring the Shell ethane cracker site and talking with Beaver County officials about how the project has impacted that area. Tuesday night, a member of the Potter Township (PA) Board of Supervisors came to a meeting of local leaders in Belmont County, to talk about the Shell cracker project and what such a project in Belmont could do for the Ohio Valley. PTT Global Chemical is supposedly close to making a final investment decision on building a cracker in Belmont. The interesting comment coming from Tuesday’s meeting was about the timing of a decision to build the PTT cracker: “It [the decision] will be revealed by the end of the year.” So says Belmont officials.
PJM Interconnection is a regional transmission organization (RTO) operating the electric grid in all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia, including PA, OH and WV. It is the largest competitive wholesale electricity market in the U.S. (second largest in the world), with more than 1,000 companies (1,376 generation sources) as members, serving 65 million customers with 177 gigawatts of generating capacity. It’s yuge! EIA published numbers yesterday quantifying natural gas-fired generation in PJM. The upshot: natural gas has eclipsed coal in electric generation in PJM, and PJM uses more natgas plants in both raw numbers and as a percentage of electricity generated, than any other power grid.
It seems that universities in states outside the Marcellus region are fascinated with the Marcellus. They love to “study” it. Or at least, the Marcellus is a goldmine for them in research grants. The latest outsider to study the Marcellus is the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Using a National Science Foundation grant, researchers from UT “will look at how aquatic microbial communities are impacted by biocides associated with hydraulic fracking.” That is, they’re studying whether or not fracking, because it has a low presence of chemicals, is creating superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics. Will fracking cause a new Black Plague?
Some of the best frac sand to be found–the finest particles–come from Wisconsin sand mines. Once upon a time Wisconsin was the primary frac sand producing state, for both the northeast and the southwest. But then Texas oil frackers began experimenting with Texas sand and found they could use it. No, the Texas sand is not quite as fine (or good) as Wisconsin sand, but it works. And it’s cheap, because transportation costs are low. Shipping sand from Wisconsin to Texas by rail costs big bucks. The northeast is not blessed with its own sand mines for fracking, so we still depend on places like Wisconsin. And now, increasingly, Wisconsin depends on us.
Que the music with dramatic drums, cymbals and trumpets. Camera A, zoom in on Secretary McDonnell. The whole state is watching. It’s time for the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) to announce the winners of PA’s Hunger Games-style contest to grab a piece of the $12.6 million “fine” paid by Sunoco Logistics Partners for “permit violations related to the construction of the Mariner East 2 pipeline project” (see 
Mountain Valley Pipeline, a project of EQT Midstream, continues to work on constructing its 303-mile long project from West Virginia into Virginia–despite a recent court order overturning some of the permits for the project (see