Plans to Export Marcellus Shale Gas Move Forward

Susan Phillips

Recent Stories

Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

September 8, 2011 | 6:30 PM

Susan Phillips / StateImpactPA

Jonathan Wolff, an analyst with ISI Group Inc. speaks to conference goers at the Shale Gas Insight convention in Philadelphia.

Dominion has filed a request with the Department of Energy to turn a Liquefied Natural Gas plant in Maryland into a facility that can both import and export gas. Currently, the Chesapeake Bay plant imports gas and ships it to U.S. markets via pipelines. But the company says the increased production in both the Utica and Marcellus Shale reserves has created a need for companies to export overseas. Dominion would need approval from the D.O.E as well as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and state regulators. The plan is to begin construction in 2014 and have it up and running by 2016.
But some analysts are skeptical of the economic benefits of exporting shale gas. Jonathan Wolff, an analyst with ISI Group Inc. says building a facility to turn natural gas into a liquid would require so much capital it would add several dollars onto the current price of domestic natural gas. Wolff told a group of investors at the Shale Insight Conference that the market for gas overseas would have to be at least $12 per million cubic feet.