Energy Stories of Interest: Mon, Sep 17, 2018
The “best of the rest”–stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading: Congressman tours drilling site in Guernsey County; Ohio oil, gas official emphasizing ‘demand opportunities’; Tellurian gets draft EIS for Driftwood LNG; Cheniere in 15-year LNG supply deal with Vitol; As protesters call for frack ban at global climate action summit, America leads world in CO2 reductions – thanks to fracking; America’s oldest operating nuclear power plant to retire on Monday; Far-reaching impact of the unprecedented shortfall in NGL fractionation capacity; Asia to drive natural gas growth over long term, according to BNEF; Shell to lay out targets to manage methane emissions; Catholic institutions unite for fossil fuel divestment.
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This is getting really old. Every few years lying antis recycle the same debunked meme that “frackers” are trying to hide the identity of big, bad nasty chemicals they use to extract shale gas. The implication is those chemicals will kill you. And if you only knew what those chemicals were, why, you’d be outraged! And demand an end to all fracking. Problem is, it’s a total lie. Chemicals are FULLY reported by drillers, for every single well they drill. But that doesn’t stop antis repeating the same meme every few years. It’s just popped up again, in Pennsylvania. The Partnership for Policy Integrity, a shell/front group for Big Green radicals, has just released a totally fictional “report” that supposedly proves drillers in PA are hiding “secret chemicals” from the public. The report, which is titled “Keystone Secrets: Records Show Widespread Use of Secret Fracking Chemicals is a Looming Risk for Delaware River Basin, Pennsylvania Communities” (full copy below), is total BS. Made up. Lies. And yet mainstream news sources pick it up and run with it, believing and spreading the lies…
The U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts has, finally, dismissed a sham lawsuit against Eversource Energy and Avangrid Inc. Last October the radical Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) published a “report” that makes the preposterous claim that New England customers have overpaid utility bills by $3.6 billion due to collusion between the natural gas and electricity industries (see 
This is all kind of speculative, but we find it intriguing and exciting. If you’ve read MDN for any length of time, you’re read about Dominion Energy’s 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which will run from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina–near the border with South Carolina. Unfortunately construction is currently on hold following revocation of some permits by a federal court, and an order from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in August to stop work on the entire project, for now (see 
Earlier this week the American Chemistry Council (ACC) announced that U.S. chemical and plastics industry investment linked to plentiful and affordable domestic supplies of natural gas and natural gas liquids (NGLs) from shale formations has surpassed $200 billion. That is a staggering number! Incomprehensible. Since 2010, 333 chemical industry projects cumulatively valued at $202.4 billion have been announced, with 53% of the investment completed or under construction, and 41% in the planning phase. Some 68% of the total is foreign direct investment or includes a foreign partner. Other countries love our shale! As good as all that is, consider this: ACC analysis shows that the $202.4 billion in capital spending could lead to $292 billion per year in new chemical and plastics industry output and support 786,000 jobs across the economy by 2025! Behold the miracle of shale fracking. Here’s the mind-blowing, fantasticly good news…
Chesapeake Energy “amended and restated” its “senior secured revolving credit facility” on Wednesday. What does that mean in everyday language? It means the company has talked a bunch of banks into allowing the company to borrow up to $3 billion on a line of credit backed by the value of the company and its assets. That’s some kind of line of credit! The 15 banks doing the loaning were actually willing to pony up $3.8 billion, but Chessy only wants to use up to $3 billion. Aside from a huge line of credit, this news indicates that the banks have confidence that Chesapeake will be an ongoing concern for the foreseeable future. That is, no serious danger of bankruptcy, even though the company still maintains a mountain-high debt load. Below are the banks willing to roll the dice on Chesapeake…
While we’re not a climate science web site, this misguided notion that mankind is causing the earth to catastrophically warm up is at the heart of irrational fossil fuel hatred–and motivates otherwise smart people into becoming bumbling fools, willing to do extraordinarily stupid things. Take, for example, the governors of 17 states–14 Democrats and three Democrat-lites (RINOs)–who recently signed a declaration to severely disadvantage their own states with so-called environmental measures that will supposedly save Mom Earth (and defeat Donald Trump, of course). These are all people who have drunk deeply from the Obama Kool Aid. Trump can’t do a single, solitary thing to revise, change, tweak or relax the massive over-regulation done by Obama, or “It’s the end of the world. We’re killing mankind. It’s an emergency. We must save the world from The Donald.” It’s freaking bizarre to watch. These states, already on the decline, will further decline economically while watching their neighbors do better. These states, all 17 of them, are being disadvantaged by the actions of their chief executives. We have the list below…
Yesterday MarkWest Liberty NGL Pipeline, a subsidiary/part of MarkWest Energy (now MPLX since being bought out and merged into Marathon Petroleum in late 2015), announced plans to build a new NGL pipeline. MarkWest Liberty launched a binding open season for the new pipeline–a time when drillers can sign on the dotted line to reserve capacity along the new pipeline. The new NGL pipeline is a bit different than other NGL pipelines in the Marcellus/Utica. It will pick up NGLs from several of MarkWest’s gas processing plants in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and cart the NGLs to fractionation facilities owned by MarkWest in PA and Ohio, where those NGLs will get separated into their discrete hydrocarbon components. Let us explain it this way: Step One is that the gas comes out of the ground. But it’s not all just methane–there’s a number of other hydrocarbons (natural gas liquids, or NGLs) mixed in with it, things like ethane, butane, propane, pentane. The raw mix goes to a cryogenic processing plant where the methane (i.e. natural gas) is separated out and sent on its way to market via pipelines like Rover and Rockies Express and others. Step Two: The NGLs need further separating. That’s what a fractionation plant does. This new pipeline from MarkWest Liberty (the Marcellus unit of MarkWest) will cart the mixed bag of NGLs to fractionation facilities. After being separated into component parts, the components can then be sold. Which fits with MarkWest’s prior statements that in 2018 they would focus on creating new markets for Marcellus/Utica NGLs, butane in particular (see 
The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) is taking the lead in investigating the Energy Transfer Revolution Pipeline explosion and fire that happened in Beaver County early Monday morning (see 
Not all that long ago (early August) the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission shut down all work on the 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), which runs from Wetzel County, WV to the Transco Pipeline in Pittsylvania County, VA (see 
Talk about a dysfunctional mess…The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), a governmental organization remote-controlled by Big Green special interests, doesn’t even know how to communicate with another governmental organization–the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Earlier this year, at the prompting of radical groups like THE Delaware Riverkeeper, DRBC sent a request to FERC asking the agency to block any tree felling ahead of a final approval by DRBC for the PennEast Pipeline–even though FERC and NOT the DRBC is the authorizing agency for PennEast. FERC doesn’t have to wait for anybody for any of its decisions. Regardless, FERC does listen, especially to fellow governmental organizations. FERC gets a LOT of mail, email, etc. from complainers like the DRBC, so they have strict protocols in place for how other agencies and parties talk to it. DRBC should have sent their request to FERC Secretary Kimberly Bose (she’s held that position and has been the point person since 2007), but DRBC didn’t follow protocol. Instead, they just fired off their huffy demand to someone else in a different department, so their huffy demand never got considered. Totally blown off. Funny! And now DRBC is scrambling, attempting to cover up the fact they’re so dysfunctional they don’t their know their heads from their…we’ll just leave it at that…
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) recently published its 2017 Oil and Gas Annual Report. This is the second year in a row the DEP has published the report in an interactive, electronic (i.e.online) format ONLY, with a stated purpose “to improve public access to well information.” While it’s interesting to have the report issued online only, it’s not as useful as a PDF or printed document, in our humble opinion. What does the report show? There were 2,028 unconventional well drilling permits issued in 2017, up an astonishing 707 (54%) from 2016. What a turnaround! There were 203 conventional well drilling permits issued in 2017, up 45 (28%) from 2016. The number of well inspections hit an all-time high of 36,288 inspections (up 2% from 2016). Below we have the DEP announcement about the new 2017 report, along with select charts & information–so you don’t have to wade through the (somewhat confusing) report yourself. We call it the MDN Guide to PA’s 2017 Oil and Gas Annual Report…
Barack Hussein Obama’s EPA wildly over-regulated during his tenure in office. They hurried to enact egregious standards for many things, but focused primarily on punishing fossil fuels. One of the obscene regulations they enacted was to limit methane emissions in oil and gas operations on the theory that methane is causing catastrophic man-made global warming (don’t get us started on that particular fairy tale). Look, the oil and gas industry sells methane, so it’s in their best interest to capture every last molecule they can capture in order to make a profit. But at a certain point it becomes uneconomical to try and capture a few stray molecules of methane here and there. Not for Big Green and its acolytes in the Obama operation. Their real mission is not to stop so-called fugitive methane, but to put the oil and gas (and coal) industries out of business by making it uneconomic. Using obscene regulations is their preferred method. With Donald Trump in office, the EPA is beginning to correct some of the wild over-regulating that happened under Obama, including methane regulations. Earlier this week the EPA floated tweaks to methane emissions regs, and the Obamadroids are screaming like babies who have soiled themselves. Yes, according to antis, Donald Trump is an ax murderer and relaxing an Obama over-regulation on methane, even slightly, will kill the entire planet…