Energy Stories of Interest: Wed, Sep 19, 2018
The “best of the rest”–stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading: PA DEP to hold public hearing on proposed Allegheny County injection well; Plumbers and pipefitters union “welcomes” Josh Fox to Youngstown; Mineral owners hear ideas about future of natural gas; California’s goal of carbon-free power estimated to cost $100B-plus; Natural gas demand normalizes as utilities restore Hurricane Florence outages; US gas industry risks losing access to massive Chinese market as trade war escalates; Technology and efficiency gains create a ‘new normal’ for U.S. shale; EPA, 25 Attorneys General urge court to keep CPP cases on hold; Best production growth for a decade heralds positive future for oil and gas; Trump admin eyes Fla. PSC chairman for FERC; European natural gas, Asian LNG markets set for ‘tight’ winter: Shell’s Wetselaar; Netherlands to ban natural gas by 2050; Ontario to expand access to natural gas.
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Once again, the forces of good have overcome the forces of evil–evil being the Sierra Club and the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and their mission to stop the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) from getting built. Yesterday the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) lifted a previously issued stop-work order that had idled work along the entire 600+ mile ACP. The stop-work order came in early August after a federal court pulled permits for approximately 100 miles of ACP in response to a lawsuit filed by the anti-American Sierra Club and a few other groups, including the SELC (see 
An article appearing on the Pittsburgh’s PBS station WESA website is, in a phrase, fake news. The article boldly states in its headline (and text) that: “Only 11 Percent Of Pennsylvania’s Natural Gas Pipelines Are Mapped For The Public.” The implication, the slight-of-hand intended to mislead lazy readers, is that 89% of natural gas pipelines in PA are not mapped at all. That simply is not true. The second graf of the story says this: “There are three types of natural gas pipelines: large transmission lines, medium-sized gathering pipelines and small distribution lines that go to homes and businesses. Transmission lines are the only ones mapped and disclosed to the public by the federal government, and they make up about 11 percent of total pipelines. There are 89,296 total natural gas pipeline miles in the commonwealth; the vast majority are small distribution lines, but more than 1,105 miles worth are gathering pipelines.” Does that not overtly imply the “vast majority” of PA’s pipelines are not even mapped? Pennsylvania recently went through a major revision of the state’s 811 system. Not only are gathering pipelines to shale wells mapped and included in the 811 system, so too are gathering lines to conventional wells. The only pipelines not part of the 811 system are those that run to “stripper wells”–wells that produce barely a puff of gas and therefore there’s no danger if you do happen to hit one when digging. The state Public Utility Commission wants to include stripper well pipelines in 811 too (see 
Last Thursday a major accident occurred 25 miles northwest of Boston when delivery pipelines owned by Columbia Gas (NiSource) in three communities exploded and caught fire at more than 80 locations (see 
Each month when we bring you the latest U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) “Drilling Productivity Report” (DPR) we say the same thing: “We shattered another record.” And so it is again this month, with the DPR issued yesterday. The DPR is the EIA’s best guess, based on expert data crunchers, as to how much each of the U.S.’s seven major shale plays will produce for both oil and natural gas in the coming month. The Marcellus/Utica region (called Appalachia in the report) continues to see production go through the roof. For six months in a row Marcellus/Utica production grew at roughly one-third of a billion cubic feet–massive! EIA says in the coming month of October, M-U production will grow another 298 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d). Hey, it’s not a full one-third Bcf, but it’s close enough. The big news is that (a) M-U production will hit another new all-time high–of 29.4 Bcf/d of production; and (b) natural gas production for all seven plays will hit another new all-time high–of 73 Bcf/d. Run the numbers and you’ll see that M-U production is 40% of all shale gas production. Let’s not ignore shale oil production, which will go up another 79,000 barrels per day in the coming month across all shale plays to a record-breaking 7.6 million barrels per day. Month after month after month we keep breaking records…
Last week MDN told you that Southwestern Energy is participating in a program to get their gas “certified” (see 
From 2008 to 2016, liberal foundations forked over $3.7 billion (!) to rabid anti-fossil fuel groups. Much of that money went into suing fossil fuel companies (and the government), attempting to outlaw fracking and the extraction of oil, gas and coal. The money is given to groups like THE Delaware Riverkeeper, Food & Water Watch, the Sierra Club and other odious bottom feeders. The media would have you believe it’s David vs. Goliath–David being these innocent little green groups, Goliath is Big Oil. It’s actually the opposite. We are fighting against a well-organized, well-funded campaign to end the use of fossil fuels. And now, finally, we have a tool to identify who is behind all that money. A new website called 
You don’t often think of the safety of the pipeline network that delivers natural gas to your home or business because it’s so rare there are any problems with it. When’s the last time you heard about a local delivery pipeline exploding? Last Thursday a major incident occurred 25 miles northwest of Boston when delivery pipelines owned by Columbia Gas (NiSource) in three communities–Andover, North Andover and Lawrence–exploded and caught fire at “more than 60 locations.” The explosions and resulting fires tragically killed one teenager and injured some 25 others. Local officials ordered over 8,000 residents and businesses in the three communities to evacuate, turning off electric and gas. Each house and business was then tested before turning electricity back on (gas is still off). Residents were finally able to return to their homes on Sunday. It’s a huge incident, a big, fat, stinking mess. Folks waited in lines for hours at claims centers to file requests for reimbursement for hotels and expenses after being displaced from their homes–only to have the claims centers close because Columbia couldn’t handle the numbers. On Friday, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker declared a state of emergency in the three communities. Later in the day on Friday, he invoked a little-used (and little-known) provision in the state constitution that allowed him to take management of the crisis away from Columbia/NiSource, giving management of the crisis to a competitor, Eversource. Although it’s still early in the investigation process, the cause of the explosions appears to be a combination of old/decaying pipes with too much pressure flowing through them. Attention has turned to pressure sensors along the pipelines. Yesterday Columbia/NiSource announced it will replace all 48 miles of the cast iron and bare steel pipeline system in that area. Meanwhile, the affected 8,000+ residents and businesses will not have gas service restored “for weeks” at a minimum…
Last Wednesday a single person employed by EdgeMarc Energy in Ohio filed a lawsuit against the company in federal court claiming he was “misclassified” as an independent contractor when in reality he was functioning as a full-blown employee. Why does it make a difference? Because independent contractors (1099s) are paid a straight, per-hour rate no matter how many hours they work, whereas employees must, under federal (and state) law, be paid overtime for any hours worked over 40. The worker alleges the company intentionally uses independent contractor status to wiggle out of paying overtime, and that he’s not the only one. Normally one disgruntled employee suing an employer is not newsworthy–but in this case the law firm is attempting to get the lawsuit certified as a class action, potentially covering hundreds of workers. And that IS a big deal…
Seven radical green groups–Sierra Club, Clean Air Council (CAC), FracTracker Alliance, Earthworks, PennFuture, Breathe Project, Environmental Integrity Project–sent a protest letter last week to the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection objecting to a request by Shell that its 97-mile Falcon Ethane Pipeline be granted certain air permit exemptions. Shell is asking the DEP to determine whether or not (hopefully not) any emissions coming from the pipeline would be “minor sources,” exempting the pipeline from certain permits. The rads are telling the DEP to deny that request, in an attempt to slow or even stop the project. With no ethane, Shell’s $6 billion cracker plant, currently under construction, can’t begin operation. Will the DEP do the right thing and ignore these nutters?…
We have to confess we have a lot in common, philosophically, with Libertarians. We like the philosophy of live and let live–as long as what you do (or what I do) doesn’t hurt the other person, nobody has a right to stop you (or me) from doing it. But the Libertarian philosophy does have its quirks–things we don’t agree with. Sometimes wacky. Like support for legalizing pot smoking. Can you imagine a bunch of potheads driving down our roads? We don’t care if they want to stone themselves into oblivion in the privacy of their own homes–but we do have public safety concerns. A fine line/balance between the public good and private freedom. Here’s another case of public good vs. private freedom: pipelines. We’ve always had a tough time with the use of eminent domain for pipelines. But in the end, the greater public good is served by running pipelines, and if there’s one or two landowners here and there who refuse to deal, eminent domain is regrettably, sometimes necessary. As a last resort. The Niskanen Center, a “right-leaning” Libertarian think tank, has just entered the pipeline debate by filing a “friend of the court” brief with U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, siding with radical anti-fossil fuelers against the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The Niskanen Center is understandably concerned about landowners’ property rights being infringed. Unfortunately, they’ve allowed themselves to be used by antis, people whose political philosophy is closer to Mao Tse Tung (Communist) than it is to freedom for everyone. How could the Niskanen Center be so easily duped? We think we know. They believe in the fairy tale of man-made global warming, which appears to color their view of freedom. If they can fall for that one, they’ll fall for anything…
Warning: Knowledge of what’s happening in the offices of governors like Jerry Brown (California) and Andrew Cuomo (New York), and their attorney generals, will make you want to throw up–at the overt corruption. A pair of research reports from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) shines a very bright light on what is major corruption at the highest levels of our state governments. One report, titled “Law Enforcement for Rent: How Special Interests Fund Climate Policy through State Attorneys General” (full copy below) details how Democrat Attorney Generals in various states, including New York and Maryland, are selling access to their offices to Big Green groups. AGs can only make so much mischief. They have budgets that control how many staffers they can hire. In order to circumvent those hiring limits, Big Green groups are funding lawyers and assistants to help AGs sue fossil fuel companies–they work right in the AG’s office! If it’s not outright illegal, it’s certainly unethical. State legislatures need to pass laws now to prevent this kind of abuse of our legal system to favor one side over another. The law is supposed to be blind and impartial, not weighted against one side or the other. If that weren’t bad enough, CEI published a second study titled “Government for Rent: How Special Interests Finance Governors to Pursue Their Climate Policy Agenda” (full copy below) showing how some Democrat governors are doing the same thing–allowing outside, paid-by-Big-Green staffers to be added to their operations in an attempt to slander and smear fossil fuel companies. Andrew Cuomo’s office is one of the offenders. THIS MUST STOP…
Events related (or of interest) to the Marcellus and Utica Shale, primarily pro-drilling events. To have your event included (or if you are aware of a worthy event you believe should be on this page), please send the details and/or a link to have it included to the calendar@marcellusdrilling.com email address.