Heavy rains caused slips, which broke gas pipelines in Marshall County, West Virginia.  The Intelligencer out of Wheeling, WV carried a couple of stories about it, the most recent of which you can find here.

Anybody who’s read much of this blog knows I am pro-development.  But I also think that if you’re considering signing a lease or a right of way agreement, you need to know what you’re getting into.  The fact is, there are dangers and downsides.  The more you know, the more you can mitigate, and the better you’ll negotiate.  When you’re talking with a landman and you can say, “I’m concerned about the dangers to my property and my family because I know that heavy rains caused two broken pipelines back in April of 2015 and there were five pipeline accidents in January of 2015, and don’t forget about the Sissonville explosion,” you’re more likely to get a favorable response than if you say, “I think pipelines are dangerous and scary.”

This doesn’t have anything at all to do with oil and gas, but it’s interesting anyways.  A gigantic rock fell on an interstate in Ohio.  Truly gigantic.  Check it out.

UPS, the shipping company, is building fifteen new compressed natural gas filling stations.   They already have eight in operation, so this will bring their total CNG filling stations to 23, if I do my math correctly.  UPS has been using CNG since 1989, and uses a number of other alternative fuels in its fleet.  They have an alternative fuels factsheet over at their website if you’d like to check into a few more details.

One of the new CNG filling stations will be located in Charleston, WV.  This is great for us!  Not that the filling station itself will bring a lot of new jobs or anything.  We need more CNG filling stations and more CNG vehicles.  The vehicles are one of the things that will drive up demand for natural gas.  More demand equals higher prices.  Higher prices equal more royalties paid and more development.

Unfortunately for Gastar, some of it’s tanks in Wetzel County caught fire early last Wednesday morning.  The cause is under investigation.  No injuries or damage have been reported so far.  It appears that even the pad wasn’t damaged.

Oil and gas production has been great for West Virginia, but it’s impossible to ignore the dangers that come along with it.  I’m all for development.  Just make sure that you educate yourself before you sign, and keep your eyes wide open after you sign.

West Virginia should really encourage development of technologies such as CNG in a Box.  It uses gas that would otherwise be wasted as flared gas to fuel vehicles that burn natural gas.  It’s quite obviously not an actual product yet, but man, it should be.

Let’s look at who wins with this.  1)  Consumers, since natural gas costs less than gasoline.  2) West Virginians, since we produce a huge amount of natural gas.  3) Car manufacturers, since they get to sell a new technology.  4) Environmentalists and producers, since gas that’s otherwise flared to the air gets put to use.  5) Environmentalists again, since clean-burning natural gas is used in place of dirtier gasoline.

The only losers are oil producers, but most of them are in the business of producing gas too, so maybe we can’t really list them as losers.  It’s probably a wash for them.

The trouble here is the old chicken/egg idea.  We need more natural gas cars to use the infrastructure, but we need more infrastructure for the natural gas cars.  Which do you build first?

The obvious answer is fleet vehicles, since companies and governments can eat the short-term costs and wait for the long-term savings.  But this technology looks like it would make it possible for gas stations to fire one of these things up at their normal site.  It might make it possible to build up the infrastructure first.