All About The Bakken -- It's Not Over Until It's Over -- The DAPL -- Now Playing In Two Courts -- October 18, 2018

Playing in two theaters now, perhaps this movie will go into wide release in 2019. Wow, this gets tedious.  

The DAPL's fate in Iowa is in the hands of the Iowa Supreme Court, if I haven't lost the bubble -- their ruling is expected in mid-November, certainly before the end of 2018.

Meanwhile, now this from The Bismarck Tribune, dated about midnight, October 18, 2018:

North Dakota landowners who unsuccessfully sued the developer of the Dakota Access oil pipeline for allegedly underpaying for land easements are maintaining that not all of their claims should have been thrown out by a federal judge.

Attorneys for the 21 landowners are scheduled to take their argument before an 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel in St. Paul, MN, today. They want the case sent back to federal court in North Dakota to resolve at least some of the claims.

The landowners sued in January 2017, alleging a company formed by Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners and a hired land acquisition consulting business used deception to acquire private land easements for the $3.8 billion pipeline built to move North Dakota oil to Illinois. They sought more than $4 million in damages.

U.S. District Judge Daniel Hovland a year ago sided with the defendants. He ruled that the landowners had failed to prove their claims, in part because fraud-based claims under federal court rules require a higher standard of proof. Hovland said the plaintiffs "clearly failed to specifically allege who made the fraudulent statements, when the statements were made, and to whom the statements were made."

The landowners in their appeal maintain that not all of their claims were based on alleged fraud.

Perhaps the US Supreme Court ... 

Maybe it's time to take a page from the TransCanada playbook: sell the pipeline to the State of North Dakota. LOL. 

The good news: the track is still there for CBR. And CBR is scalable.

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Too Much Litigation In The Northeast? I Don't Know

Or Simply Better Financial Prospects?

Meanwhile, another pipeline / pipeline company in the news. From oilprice.com:

Kinder Morgan has decided to shelve its Utica Marcellus Texas Pipeline project, the company said at the presentation of its third-quarter financial results. Instead, Kinder Morgan said, it will focus on its existing Tennessee Gas Pipeline, which transports natural gas from the Gulf Coast in Louisiana to the northeast, including New York and Boston.

The UMTP was supposed to transport natural gas liquids from the Utica and Marcellus shale plays to the Gulf Coast in Texas. Back in 2015, the company filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to abandon the TGP project in favor of the UMTP, which would have had a design capacity of 430,000 barrels daily. Now, the company will instead start working on reversing the flow of the TGP and is looking for producer commitments for the route between Appalachia and the Gulf Coast.

Kinder Morgan exceeded analyst expectations with its third-quarter results, reporting a net profit of US$693 million and announcing a quarterly dividend of US$0.20 per share. The net result compares with US$334 million booked in the third quarter of 2017. Cash flow also improved, rising 4 percent from Q3 2017 to US$1.1 billion, Kinder Morgan said.

No reason given? On the other hand, from the same linked article:

At the same time, the company made a final investment decision on another pipeline, this time in the Permian, where producers have been faced with growing pipeline bottlenecks as production grows faster than the pipeline network. Kinder Morgan said it had secured sufficient long-term commitments for the Permian Highway pipeline to begin construction.