Will There Ever be a New Pipeline from Marcellus to New England?
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 2nd LNG Tanker with Russian Gas Coming to Boston?!). Gas from the Russian Arctic is the ultimate insanity given that the Marcellus Shale is a few hundred miles away and our gas could easily supply all of New England’s growing needs. Yet New England refuses to allow new pipelines. It’s insane! As we ask the question in our headline, Will there ever be a pipeline built to New England? Answer: It all depends on politicians in New England.
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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 
In September the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) lifted a stop-work order for the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) project that stretches from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina (see 
You can just imagine it. Maya van Rossum (THE Delaware Riverkeeper), Tony Ingraffea (former Cornell prof and member of Trout Unlimited), Sandra Steingraber (paid by Ithaca College to be a climate protester) and other far-out lefties sitting in a room hatching yet another plan to block new pipeline projects, all in a bid to stop the use of all fossil fuels. “I know I know!” says one of them. “Let’s create a map of ‘high value streams and rivers’ and ‘areas of ecological sensitivity’ and then dare those filthy, nasty pipeline companies to build a pipeline across any of them. We’ll draw the map so every area is at ‘risk’–except for a few ditches in the middle of nowhere. That’ll do it!” And, voila, Trout Unlimited (TU), colluding with other Big Green groups, has just released a magical map to, you know, be “helpful” to pipeline companies, so they know where they can’t stick a nasty pipeline (i.e. anywhere). That’s what TU has just released.
The Pennsylvania Senate Appropriations Committee will today conduct an “off-the-floor” meeting to discuss and potentially report out for a vote House Bill (HB) 2154, a bill introduced in March to “roll back” (more like “lock in”) regulations that govern conventional PA drilling to the Oil and Gas Act of 1984 (see