Philadelphia Refinery Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES), which operates the East Coast’s largest refinery on the banks of the Delaware River, has sadly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. PES had been on a mission to expand their operation at the Southport Marine site in Philadelphia by leasing an additional 200 acres to build a terminal for shale oil imports and exports. However, in November 2016, PA Gov. Wolf killed that plan when he decided to give a sweetheart deal to another company to develop a parking lot on the site, to park incoming cars arriving by container ships from Japan (see PA Gov Wolf Kills Plan for PES Refinery Expansion in Philadelphia). PES’ stated reason for bankruptcy is due to an onerous EPA requirement that refiners must blend in biofuel with gasoline and diesel, or purchase very expensive credits. PES can’t blend, so they must buy the credits, and it’s put them under water financially. Sadly, the Trump administration caved to the Midwest corn growers lobby and decided to uphold the Obama EPA’s onerous requirement…
Read More “Philadelphia Refinery Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy”
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) continues to hound the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) about a potential spill of drilling mud by Rover Pipeline near the Tuscarawas River. Last week we told you that OEPA, which has ZERO regulatory oversight of the Rover Pipeline project, had been told (by informants) that when Rover restarted underground horizontal directional drilling (HDD) work at the Tuscarawas site, some 146,000 gallons of drilling mud went down the hole but never came back out (see 
For years now the radical Park Park Foundation has been buying its research from a few select professors at a few select universities. One of the scientists for sale is Avner Vengosh, professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment (see 
Events related (or of interest) to the Marcellus and Utica Shale, primarily pro-drilling events.
The “best of the rest”–stories that caught MDN’s eye over the break that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: Keystone XL pipe construction to begin next year; forward gas prices key to keeping Haynesville recovery alive; Patterson-UTI Energy announces closing on $525M in notes; Congress wants to give FERC final say on natgas exports; China boosts LNG imports ahead of next cold snap; Venezuela’s oil industry is done for; and more!
It’s not often MDN gets to write about a brand new driller (i.e. exploration & production company) arriving on the scene in the Marcellus/Utica region. This is one of those happy days! Salt Fork Resources, started in March 2017 and headquartered in Canonsburg, PA, was started by three men with extensive experience in the Appalachian region. The company was/is backed by Riverstone Holdings, an investment firm focused on power and energy. The reason that Salt Fork appeared on our radar screen is because of a press release from Riverstone announcing they have “upsized” their backing of Salt Fork–that is, they are giving Salt Fork more money to lease more acreage and drill. How much money? The release does not say. We do know that Salt Fork has, so far, amassed a very respectable 20,000 acres “in the core of the dry gas window of the Utica Shale.” We also know, from their website, that Salt Fork is targeting the Utica in both Ohio and West Virginia. Salt Fork is a portfolio company of Riverstone (i.e. Riverstone owns it). The money Riverstone is giving to Salt Fork is equity, not debt–meaning Salt Fork hasn’t had to borrow a dime, a minor miracle for any oil and gas company. Does Riverstone sound familiar? It should. We’ve previously written about their other Marcellus/Utica region investments a number of times (
Earlier this week TransCanada (i.e. Columbia Pipeline) broke ground for a new $100 million compressor station that will flow gas through the Mountaineer XPress Pipeline. MDN previously told you that at the end of December the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a final approval for Mountaineer (see 
“One word: Plastics” (The Graduate) – Mercer County, which is two counties and 50 miles north of Beaver County (located along the border with Ohio) is making plans now for how their county to grab some of the “low hanging fruit” that will appear when the Shell ethane cracker in Beaver County goes online in the early 2020s. You read that right. NOW is the time for counties in the region to make plans and set those plans in motion to attract some of the numerous businesses that will set up shop to be close to the cracker plant. Mercer County officials recently attended a forum where the topic was ancillary development that will happen because of the cracker plant. What is the low hanging fruit that will magically appear with the cracker? Manufacturing–and the jobs that go with it. In particular, manufacturing and jobs in the plastics industry. A regional trade organization–Penn-Northwest Development Corp.–is planning to hit the plastics industry trade shows this year. Penn-Northwest is working with counties like Mercer to help them market themselves to plastics manufacturers…
MDN previously highlighted news from a relatively new company called American Energy Partners, Inc., based in Allentown, PA, and their subsidiary company Gilbert Oil & Gas (
North Carolina has a Democrat governor. The state Dept. of Environmental Quality (DEQ) is an executive branch agency. So it’s no surprise to learn that the DEQ is antagonistic toward Dominion Energy’s $5 billion, 594-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP)–a natural gas pipeline that will stretch from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina. In October the DEQ rejected a plan submitted by Dominion for the pipeline project, claiming the erosion and sediment control part of the plan is not up to snuff (see 
The following guest post was written by Rick Hiduk:
A leftist filmmaker is attempting to get enough money via a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new propaganda film called “The Power of Protest,” which looks at five radical/left “protest” movements, one of which is Lancaster Against Pipelines (LAP). LAP is an anti-fossil fuel group founded to try to stop Williams’ $3 billion Atlantic Sunrise project, a 198-mile natural gas pipeline running through 10 Pennsylvania counties to connect Marcellus Shale natural gas from northeastern PA with the Williams’ Transco pipeline in southern Lancaster County. The married couple who started LAP, Mark and Malinda Clatterbuck, are far-left radicals who pretend to be mom and pop, salt-of-the-earth, neighbor-next-door, aw-shucks common folks who would never engage in “violent” protests. Mark Clatterbuck admits to traveling to North Dakota to participate in the mass action against the Dakota Access Pipeline–a “protest” that turned quite violent and destroyed millions of dollars of property. No, we’re not saying nor implying that Clatterbuck himself engaged in illegal actions while there. We are saying the Clatterbucks’ sympathies lie with protest movements that sometimes result in such actions. There is a very fine line for leftists between violent and non-violent protests–and all too often they tip over into the latter. They simply can’t accept the fact other people disagree with their extreme, outside-the-mainstream positions. In advertising the Kickstarter campaign to try and gin up money to fund the movie, the Clatterbucks and LAP are pushed front and center as examples of “mass protests” and their supposed effectiveness. We recall that Malinda Clatterbuck once claimed LAP has “over 1,000 people” willing to show up and engage in “nonviolent” protests against Atlantic Sunrise. So far, a grand total of 45 of their “committed” 1,000+ members have shown up and gotten themselves arrested (see 
We spotted an article a month ago that is shocking and disturbing. This is the first time we’ve had a chance in our daily article roundup to bring it to you. A Stanford University professor pedals a “religion” that claims the world can be fueled by 100% renewable energy. That is, renewables can provide everything we need: electricity, heating, transportation, industry, shipping, the works. And renewables can do it so well that we won’t need power plants that run on actual fuel. It’s a bizarre viewpoint, but there you go. Some people believe in Santa Claus too. The Stanford prof published a paper espousing this theory. There were a lot of factual flaws in the paper, so another scientist (actually 22 prominent scientists) published a paper pointing out the problems with the Stanford prof’s paper. That’s how it’s done in academe. You put your research out there, and others can (often do) come along and question it with their own research and rebuttal. That’s how science gets better. So what did the Stanford prof do? He sued one of the 22 authors of the dissenting paper, along with the academic journal that published it! Sued them for libel. The person he chose to sue isn’t affiliated with an institution with a legal team to defend him–so this is selective persecution. An attempt at legal bullying. No longer is science something we debate with published findings. Now it’s a matter of faith–and God help you if you believe on the wrong side of an issue like global warming, or renewables. If you dare to believe the “wrong way”–or worse yet poke holes in a true believer’s theories–you may get hauled into court. An ebook titled “ROADMAP TO NOWHERE: The Myth of Powering the Nation With Renewable Energy” (full copy below) covers this controversy and shines a light on what you thought you knew about so-called renewables. The ebook compares renewables with nuclear energy (we wish it were natgas, but perhaps using nuclear is the better comparison in this case). Take a blood pressure pill before you read the following…
MDN is please to announce the completion of improvements to our website. We began a journey last fall when Google (the 800-pound Internet gorilla) informed us that we needed to begin serving all of our webpages at an https (i.e. secure) address. That’s not to say there was anything inherently unsecure or bad about the way we were serving our webpages, but Google wanted it done. And what Google wants, Google gets. So we embarked on a path to both update the look and feel of the website and make our pages 100% secured. We launched our updated look and feel in early October, the first such update since the site began in 2009 (see MDN Launches Redesigned Web Site – We’d Like Your Feedback). The secure pages part took a bit longer that we expected. We finally got that part operating in early December (see 