Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

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Natural Gas NOW readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy. As usual, emphasis is added.

A New York and New England Suicide Pact?

Dan Markind has written a great post titled “When the Snow Turns Green” that includes these astute observations:

New York and New England continue to pursue policies destined to produce both energy deficiency and environmental destruction.  The Boston Globe reported that two Massachusetts towns, Holyoke and Middleborough, have issued moratoria on new natural gas hookups due to lack of supply.  This follows Con Edison’s moratorium in Westchester County, New York.

Massachusetts’s supply constraint is the result of the Bay State’s failure to allow the build out of natural gas pipelines from the Marcellus Shale region of Northeastern Pennsylvania.  The Globe warned that many energy experts believe that while the State’s two largest gas suppliers, National Grid and Eversource, claim their natural gas supplies are adequate for now, that won’t last long.

Environmentalists in Massachusetts call for increasing supplies from Canadian hydropower and offshore wind, but fail to state what the grid to store and transmit that power would look like.  Skeptics also note that whenever a large offshore wind farm project is proposed there is mass opposition from many of the same environmentalists who oppose shale drilling.  Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, the New Jersey Shore, Chesapeake Bay, Vermont and others are places where offshore wind farms have been proposed but dropped due to local opposition.  Where exactly do we build the wind farms that the environmentalists want?

It is this type of idealistic, irrational thinking that results in environmental destruction.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” calls for eliminating fossil fuels in ten years.  Were this concept to pass, how would that occur?  Presumably, a politically appointed group would be authorized to decide unilaterally how and where energy is created, where transmission lines go, and how it gets stored. To make this work at all, there could be little opportunity for public input.  There wouldn’t be enough time.

But how happy could the public possibly be ceding this kind of decision making to a politically appointed body?  And what about things like eminent domain and the need to seize private property for wind turbines, solar panels and the like? Where and how will power storage occur when battery storage technology simply does not exist at present to meet the demands of the system, etc?  The result would be a disaster for our environment, if it could even work at all which is most dubious.

Read the whole thing.

Hey, Watch What You’re Sayin’

Never take a carload of lawyers for a test drive of a Tesla:

I have no comment, of course.

$32 Billion Being Invested in Appalachian Basin Pipelines!

There’s no better indication of the sheer magnitude of the shale revolution than these statistics from Energy In Depth:

The Appalachian Basin is projected to produce roughly 31.6 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d) of natural gas in March, according to the Energy Information Administration. The bulk of this extensive and much-needed regional infrastructure build-out is focused on expanding take-away capacity, enabling the Marcellus and Utica shale gas produced here to be used not only within the tri-state but across the country and even globally.

EID’s new infographic shows construction of all proposed pipelines will add nearly 23 bcf/d of natural gas pipeline take-away capacity. That’s enough room to move nearly 72 percent of the natural gas produced in the region…

It’s clear that the shale revolution has been and will continue to provide a major economic driver for the Appalachian region. Industry investments will bring new jobs and economic opportunity to local communities and will help relieve energy constraints across the Northeast.

Amazing. Just amazing.

Climate Kid Just Another Serial Protester!

Why do those who want to convince others global warming is a serious threat resort to such despicable tactics? If it isn’t a refusal to debate and discuss, it’s stupid gimmick like the “climate kids” lawsuit, featured on 60 Minutes, where lead “kid” 23-year old Kelsey Juliana is promoted as the super-sincere idealistic child just wanting to save the planet. The whole lawsuit thing is a silly social construct designed to advance a special interest agenda and, Kelsey, the lead plaintiff, it turns out, is a serial protester. She served, in fact, as photographer for one of the We Are Seneca Lake protests in 2014:

Kelsey was apparently part of trust-funder John Cleveland Abbe’s group, who came east from Oregon to do the bidding of the Park Foundation and Rockefeller’s Sustainable Markets Foundation. She was also tweeting in 2014, promoting FERC blockades, anti-war causes, die-ins and the fascist Beyond Extreme Energy group, with help from the usual gentry class funding sources.

The whole “climate kids lawsuit,” in other words, is a cruel joke played on society by a collection of spoiled kids all along the way with some help from CBS, of course. How the hell does society survive this crap? It’s a wonder.