Dominion Signals Delay in Cove Point Start-up; Contract Related?
For months Dominion’s top brass has signaled that the country’s newest LNG export facility, Cove Point (situated along the coast of Maryland), would begin full commercial operations “by the end of this year” (see Dominion 3Q17: Cove Point LNG Coming Online, ACP Permits in Dec). That has now changed to “early next year”–which is a disappointment. Earlier this month Dominion began the commissioning process, where they use already-chilled LNG (from a tanker) to cool down the equipment, prior to running regular natural gas through it for the first time (see Dominion Cove Point LNG Export – Dress Rehearsal Begins). It appears the commissioning process to check out all of the equipment and to make triple sure everything is OK is taking longer than Dominion expected. The delay, along with a Reuters story, has given rise to rumors that Dominion’s signed-on-the-dotted-line customer from India is getting cold feet and attempting to renegotiate their long-term, 20-year contract. Dominion says, in so many words, that’s hogwash. Dominion says the slight delay in beginning full commercial operations has nothing to do with “contract renegotiations” and everything to do with a “comprehensive round of thorough testing and quality assurance activities.” However, the Reuters article quotes an Indian official as saying they have held a “number of discussions…for re-negotiation of the contracts.” Is contract renegotiation really the reason for Cove Point’s delayed start?…
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A group of landowners in Ohio calling themselves the Coalition to Reroute Nexus (CORN), whom we affectionately call CORNballs, filed a lawsuit in federal court in May against the NEXUS pipeline project (see 
The Millennium Pipeline stretches ~244 miles from Independence in Steuben County, NY to Buena Vista in Rockland County, NY. The Millennium, which is supplied by local production and storage fields and interconnecting upstream pipelines, serves customers along its route in New York’s Southern Tier region and helps meet the energy needs of northeast markets. In August 2016, the Millennium filed an application for what it calls its Eastern System Upgrade (see 
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By our reckoning, Antero Resources’ $275 million wastewater recycling facility in Doddridge County, WV is now operational (see 
Looks like the Utica/Marcellus has its own brand of beer! Who knew? We spotted an article about a small startup called Shale Brewing Company–saying the company is “back.” Back from where? We didn’t know it existed and had left, let alone that it’s now “back.” The company produces microbrews with names like “Cold Rolled Ale” and “Roughneck Red.” Hmm, we thought that sounded intriguing, so we kept digging. We found information that Shale Brewing Company was started by shale co-workers who had “a passion for easy drinking brews.” The company, started in 2014, “has had a couple of starts and stops since its early days as a nanobrewery.” But once again it’s back–this time making batches of beer in downtown Canton, OH. Currently it’s hard to find a bottle of Shale Brewery’s beer, but there are a few locations around Canton where you can score a six pack…
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: OH Utica Shale counties to watch in 2018–Belmont & Jefferson; Rover Pipe donates to first responders; Atlantic Sunrise donates mountain of toys to Toys 4 Tots; Florida considering new gas-fired power plant; Duke gas-fired turbine gets NC approval; Utah’s cleanest natgas power plant comes online; Big Green sues Trump admin re delay of methane rule; Wall Street returns to funding shale; plenty of opportunities to invest in midstream in 2018; the next oil price collapse; France to end all oil & gas production by 2040; and more!
Yesterday our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), issued our favorite monthly report, the Drilling Productivity Report (DPR). 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. EIA has adjusted their previous prediction for December’s natural gas production from 61.7 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) to 62.3 Bcf/d. Wow! Not only that, EIA predicts average production in January 2018 will hit 63 Bcf/d–yet another record high in a string of successive monthly record highs going back more than a year. The 800-pound gorilla is, of course, the Marcellus/Utica region. Our region will add another 347 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of natural gas production from December to January. Yikes! Of the seven major shale play regions tracked in the DRP, Appalachia (the Marcellus/Utica) represents a full 42% of total U.S. production! Our region is a MONSTER natural gas producer. Here’s the latest DPR, along with some analysis from Reuters…
In November MDN shared the exciting news that an old oil pipeline stretching from Northampton County, PA through Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester counties, terminating in Delaware County at Marcus Hook, had been purchased by a subsidiary of New Jersey Resources and will get converted to flow more Marcellus natural gas to the greater Philadelphia region (see 
It’s GO-TIME at the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). GO-TIME stands for Governor’s Office of Transformation, Innovation, Management and Efficiency. In English, please! “Eliminate paper by using electronic devices.” Yesterday DEP Deputy Secretary for Oil and Gas Management Scott Perry said that by dumping paper and using apps on iPads, oil and gas inspectors save goodles of time by not filling out paperwork “back at the office” and instead stay in the field longer. All of which means that even with using less inspectors in 2017, the DEP actually increased the number of well site inspections by an extra 2,000 over 2016, saving the agency half a million dollars. It’s about time the DEP came into the 21st century. Now if we could only get them to speed up well permit approvals…
The Lansing, Michigan Board of Water & Light (BWL) announced yesterday it will build a brand new $500 million natural gas-fired power plant. The new plant will generate 250 megawatts of electricity, create 1,200 construction jobs, and go online in 2021. The plant will be located at the Erickson Power Station facility in Delta Township as part of its Lansing Energy Tomorrow plan, replacing (and retiring) BWL’s coal-fired Eckert plant at that location. Out with old, in with the new. Why report about a new gas-fired power plant in Michigan here on MDN? Because the mighty Rover Pipeline, which is due to be completed and online by the end of March 2018, terminates very close to Lansing (see the map below). While we’ve not spotted any stories indicating where the gas will come from to feed the new Lansing plant, we’d wager a lot of money that at least some–perhaps most/all–of the gas to feed the plant will come from the Utica/Marcellus, gas hitching a ride along the Rover Pipeline. The nuts from the Sierra Club are ecstatic that BWL will close the coal plant, but opposed to building a clean-burning natural gas plant. Some people are never happy…
Last Friday MDN told you about three proposed new injection wells planned for the Town of Brookfield, in Trumbull County, OH (see 
Only in New York State do you find this kind of lunacy. Yesterday Consolidated Edison (Con Ed), one of the nation’s largest investor-owned energy companies, announced a request for proposals (RFP) looking for an alternative to building a new pipeline to get more natural gas into New York City–where the gas is desperately needed. Yes, pipelines are the safest mode of transportation in existence. Yet Con Ed wants something less-safe. Why? They don’t say, but no doubt to avoid dealing with the increasingly violent enviro left that opposes anything to do with fossil fuels–particularly pipelines. In Con Ed’s RFP they throw out some helpful hints at what enterprising businesses might consider proposing: “energy efficiency” (i.e. turn the thermostat down); “beneficial electrification of space or water heating” (i.e. use electricity instead of natural gas for water heaters and heating your apartment); “demand response programs” (i.e. use less by shifting the time when you use the gas); “provision of biogas” (use biogas–cow farts–instead of filthy fracked gas). Dead last on the list: “distributed natural gas storage, CNG, or LNG”–if you *must* propose using natural gas, figure out how to get it into the city without a new pipeline. Use less-safe tanker trucks, or figure out how to store gas from existing pipelines. Most of Con Ed’s proposed solutions aren’t about getting more gas into NYC, they’re about using less gas overall. Yeah, only in New York…
Freedom in New York State is all but gone–snuffed out by a corrupt dictator by the name of Andrew Cuomo. Warning to other states: Be careful who you elect in high office. Cuomo is not content to simply destroy the drilling industry in NY–he wants to destroy anything to do with fossil fuels. Crude oil from the Bakken in North Dakota has, for some time, arrived in New York’s capitol city of Albany via rail cars where the oil is loaded on barges at the Port of Albany for a quick trip down the Hudson River. Cuomo went after those rail shipments, trying to slow them down or stop them altogether (see 
Last week MDN brought you the news about a vote from the Virginia State Water Control Board that gave Dominion’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline a non-approval approval (see