Marcellus & Utica Shale Story Links: Mon, Jan 21, 2013

The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading:

Maryland

Some Signed Low-Rent Drilling Leases
CBS Local/The Daily Record
The land men came one evening in 2006, offering property owners modest riches for a simple act: leasing their land rights to the natural gas industry’s middlemen.

New York

Events across N.Y. generate fracking response
O-R Online
State regulations make for pretty dull reading, but you’d never know it from the mountains of cardboard boxes of public comments generated by the latest gas-drilling guidelines proposed by New York’s environmental agency.

Siena poll finds 51 percent of upstate NY voters oppose hydrofracking
Business Journal
A new Siena College poll found 51 percent of upstate New York voters oppose hydrofracking, a controversial method of extracting natural gas from deep rock formations that state environmental regulators are considering whether to permit.

Women’s Group Gets it Right; Balanced Energy Approach Provides Solutions
Energy in Depth – NMI
A recent conference of of women in the energy and communications sectors in New York City focused on the need for a balanced approach to energy development in New York, one that will heavily involve natural gas.  It is the only strategy that offers sensible solutions to the state’s energy demands, given the practical realities.

Pennsylvania

Taking a Harder Look at Fracking and Health
New York Times
A coalition of academic researchers in the United States is preparing to shine a rigorous scientific light on the polarized and often emotional debate over whether using hydraulic fracturing to drill for natural gas is hazardous to human health.

Bi-fuel vehicles gaining speed
The Times-Tribune
Detroit is beginning to produce vehicles that can run on both natural gas and regular gasoline. Anyone who has natural gas service in their home can tap off the same gas line to gas up their vehicle – at least until more commercial natural gas stations are established.

Loco Ono & Son Descend on Dimock to Fight Natural Gas Heating Their Home
Energy in Depth – NMI
Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, together with a host of other characters, jumped into two Mercedes vehicles to head to Dimock and campaign against natural gas in New York, the same natural gas that heats the home of the Beatles beneficiaries.

West Virginia

Beef Association holds gas drilling meeting
NewsandSentinel.com
As drilling and well development for natural gas from the Marcellus Shale make their way into the Mid-Ohio Valley, landowners need to be aware of what developers may do to their land and how they may be compensated for what comes out of those wells, speakers said.

National

API welcomes BLM halt on new fracking rules for federal lands
Akron Beacon Journal
API President and CEO Jack Gerard welcomed the Bureau of Land Management decision to take proposed federal hydraulic fracturing regulations back to the drawing board.

Natural gas producers pushing White House to allow more exports
Greeley Tribune/Philadelphia Inquirer
Pennsylvania natural-gas producers are stepping up a campaign to lobby the White House to allow more fuel exports and accelerate drilling in the Marcellus Shale region.

Dot Earth Blog: Is ‘Wild West’ Era for Fracking Coming to an End?
FiveThirtyEight
While in Washington to run a panel at an invaluable conference on disasters and the environment this week, I spent a few minutes in a studio to discuss the issues and opportunities surrounding hydraulic fracturing for natural gas on the Current TV show The War Room, hosted by Jennifer Granholm, the former governor of Michigan.

The Heated Debate Over Shale Gas
Motley Fool
One of the few bright spots in the American economy that almost everyone seems to agree on is the energy sector. Advancements in drilling technologies have made it possible to extract vast quantities of oil and gas from shale formations.