Facility

MarkWest Energy Partners LP on Thursday said its Houston Processing and Fractionation facility in southwest Pennsylvania would remain offline until a full assessment of equipment could be made after a lightning strike on Wednesday caused limited damage to one of its processing plants there.

Following three major incidents in less than a year at three of its big onshore natural gas facilities, Williams is commissioning a third-party independent company to conduct a companywide safety audit, a spokesman told NGI on Thursday.

A startup company that launched plans in 2012 to develop a small-scale, regionally-focused ethane cracker in the Appalachian Basin continues to promote its project two years on, but even though more specifics have been released, the company still can’t say with certainty when it will break ground for the project.

Natural gas supplies that were interrupted at the Opal hub in Wyoming following an explosion and fire were being flowed through a different processing plant Thursday afternoon. Opal had been supplying up to 1 Bcf/d to interstate pipelines before the incident Wednesday at the Williams Partners LP facility.

A “not in my backyard” fight is shaping up in southeast Pennsylvania, where in Berks County, a grassroots organization has been formed to oppose a 500,000 gallon/d gas-to-liquids (GTL) facility that would produce gasoline and propane on a 63-acre plot in South Heidelberg Township.

Additional North American liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects are high on Sempra Energy's list of growth projects, COO Mark Snell said Thursday at the company's annual analysts meeting in San Diego.

GreenHunter Water LLC’s $1.7 million water treatment, recycling and condensate handling logistics terminal in Wheeling, WV, remains in limbo nearly one year after the company announced the project.

Plans for twin natural gas-fueled methanol plants to be sited in Washington’s lower Columbia River region were unveiled this week. They could, pending approvals, be exporting production to China by 2018.

Researchers from Duke University published another controversial study on Wednesday, this time taking aim at a wastewater treatment plant in western Pennsylvania after finding radioactive chemicals in an adjacent creek bed, and blaming the find on Marcellus Shale development.