Energy Stories of Interest: Fri, Nov 9, 2018
The “best of the rest”–stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading: Democrat Senate gives fresh energy to environmental advocates in NY; Keystone XL Pipeline project blocked by Obama judge in Montana; More coal-fired power plants closing on uncompetitive economics; LNG carrier attacked off Nigeria; Poland signs deal for long-term natural gas deliveries from Louisiana, Texas; Armenian government seeks cuts in gas prices from Russia; Higgs government looking to partially lift fracking moratorium; As renewables drive up energy prices, voters in U.S., Asia & Europe are opting for nuclear power.
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We have some exciting news to share. A company called New Fortress Energy is planning to build an LNG (liquefied natural gas) liquefaction plant in Wyalusing (Bradford County), PA. The $800 million (!) plant will supercool and liquefy locally extracted Marcellus Shale gas and ship it first by truck, eventually by rail, to “customers in the U.S. as well as abroad.” Meaning exports. How cool is that? It seems that LNG liquefaction plants no longer have to be located along a shoreline to engage in exports. Which company will provide the gas to liquefy and export? MDN has the exclusive answer, and yes, you need to be an MDN paying subscriber to find out…
Virulent anti-drillers in Youngstown, OH have now tried eight times to pass a so-called Community Bill of Rights ballot measure–and have failed all eight times, most recently on Tuesday. The local yokels from Youngstown working on the initiative are pawns, useful idiots, for an ultra-radical group from Pennsylvania called the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). The CELDF is behind dozens of such efforts, none of which has been successful. The Youngstown ballot measure sought to ban fracking and ban any company related to the extraction of fossil fuels from operating in the city. The CELDF is also behind a number of bizarre lawsuits–like the one claiming that an ecosystem is a “person” with rights (see 
From time to time we read about, and bring you news about, companies in our industry floating “notes”–what we call IOUs–a form of debt used to finance new spending or (in this case) refinance and pay off older debt. We’re not high finance experts, but it always looks to us like an elaborate shell game of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Just kick the debt can on down the road. But so many companies do it, there’s obviously some advantage. The latest, and biggest by far we’ve seen, is MPLX (MarkWest Energy). They just announced they are floating a whopping $2.25 billion of “unsecured senior notes.” MPLX will use $750 million of it to pay off older notes, and the rest to repay loans borrowed under the company’s revolving credit facility, and repay loans made to parent company Marathon Petroleum.
We get pretty exercised over the ongoing abuse and total corruption of our justice system at the hands of Democrat Attorneys General who have sold access to their offices to Big Green funders. We previously told you about a pair of new reports shining a light on corrupt AGs in New York and other states, abusing their offices in an attempt to criminalize fossil fuel companies (see 
Miracle of miracles, two (!) Democrat FERC commissioners (Cheryl LaFleur and Dick Glick), along with one Republican commissioner (Chairman Neil Chatterjee), voted unanimously to extend the time frame by another two years for Williams to build the Constitution Pipeline. As you may recall, the Constitution was stopped cold by corrupt NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his lackeys at the state Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC). Constitution is planned to run from Susquehanna County, PA up into, and mostly situated in, New York State. Cuomo won’t be happy with this decision because it’s a very loud and clear signal that FERC believes the project *will* some day get built.
Yet another Range Resources alumnus is now working for someone else–himself. Matt Curry, a chemical engineer and Pittsburgh native who used to work for Range, along with Chris Combs, who’s worked for a number of drilling services companies in Texas, co-founded Praetorian Energy Solutions, a “pressure pumping and pumpdown services” headquartered in Canonsburg, PA. The company, launched earlier this year, is (so far) working in the Eagle Ford Shale play in Texas–because that’s where they bought their equipment. That equipment will be heading north soon to operate in the Marcellus/Utica. What is a pressure pumping/pumpdown company?
More than four years ago MDN posed the question, could an alternate trading hub like Dominion South in Pennsylvania ever replace the venerable Henry Hub trading hub in Louisiana as the world benchmark (see 
We spotted an intriguing editorial in the Williamsport Sun-Gazette. It quotes a study by “an independent, market-based think tank” with some phenomenal findings. If you invest $1 million in solar, over a 30-year period you’ll get around 25 million kilowatt hours of electricity. If you invest that same $1 million in wind, you’ll get 50 million kilowatt hours over a 30-year period. But if you invest the same $1 million in natural gas-fired electric generation (cost to extract the gas, etc.), you’ll get 400 million kilowatt hours of electricity over 30 years! Natgas yields 8 times as much electricity per dollar as wind, and 16 times as much as solar.
Who regulates what when it comes to the federal government and the oil and gas industry? We have an alphabet soup of federal agencies and agencies within agencies that regulate some aspects of drilling (on federal lands), pipelines, and by extension (because of air emissions) compressor stations, trucking and more when it comes to our industry. We recently spotted a helpful article that gives a high-level overview of who is regulating what. It’ll make your head spin! And this is just at the federal level. Add to this each state with its own regulatory fiefdoms and it’s a miracle any drilling ever happens.