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35 New Shale Well Permits Issued for PA-OH-WV Dec 11-17
New shale permits issued for Dec 11 – 17 in the Marcellus/Utica continued the trend up over the previous week. There were 35 new permits issued last week versus 27 issued two weeks ago. Last week’s permit tally included 17 new permits in Pennsylvania, 13 new permits in Ohio, and 5 new permits in West Virginia. The company receiving the most permits last week was Ascent Resources with 8 new permits in two different counties: Guernsey and Belmont counties in OH. Antero was second highest with 5 new permits in Ritchie and Doddridge counties in WV.
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Glenn O. Hawbaker, Inc.
Every now and again, we come across someone who is willing to risk their career by openly admitting the truth. This time that brave soul is Russell Johns, the George E. Trimble Chair in Energy and Mineral Sciences at the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State University. In a letter to the editor published in the student-run Penn State Daily Collegian, Johns points out that when considering the intense mining operations needed to harvest materials used in solar and wind technology, and the shipping associated with those materials, etc., solar and wind actually have a *bigger* carbon dioxide footprint than does using natural gas. In other words, natural gas is greener than wind and solar!
Last week Pennsylvania issued 15 new permits for shale well drilling, up nicely from the prior week of just 2 new permits. Ohio issued 9 new permits last week, and West Virginia issued 8 new permits. All totaled, the M-U saw 32 new permits issued last week, the most we’ve seen in a single week for some time. More drilling on the way!
We don’t write much about Alta Resources, a shale drilling company co-founded by the inventor of shale fracking, George Mitchell. But that doesn’t mean Alta doesn’t drill in the Marcellus. The company owns some 547,000 gross (239,000 net) acres producing natural gas from approximately 900 wells in the Marcellus Shale across Bradford, Wyoming, Sullivan, Lycoming, Clinton, and Centre counties in northeast Pennsylvania. Alta is shopping all of their considerable Marcellus assets, looking for a buyer.
We don’t often see news about a Marcellus producer called Alta Resources. Alta was one of the first drillers we wrote about just after launching the MDN website back in 2009 (see 
Last November MDN told you that Northeast Natural Energy, a small-to-midsized driller headquartered in Morgantown, WV, had lost an arbitration battle and owed a group of landowners in central Pennsylvania $7.9 million in payments for NOT drilling on their land (see 
Pennsylvania’s Pipeline Investment Program (or PIPE) grants cover part of the cost of building new natgas pipelines to connect homes and businesses in rural parts of the state to homegrown Marcellus Shale gas supplies. We’ve written about many of the more-than-a-dozen (so far) PIPE grant projects in the past (
Northeast Natural Energy (NNE) is a small-to-midsized driller headquartered in Morgantown, WV. It’s a young company, drilling its first shale well in 2013. In April 2017 MDN reported that NNE had obtained $300 million of investment from two investment firms (see 
Rex Energy, a driller focused mainly on the Marcellus/Utica (headquartered in State College, PA), announced earlier this week that it is selling some of its non-operated oil and gas assets in three Pennsylvania counties: Westmoreland, Centre and Clearfield. Which assets are not described. The buyer is: XPR Resources. The sale amount is $17.2 million. Rex has, in the past couple of years, had stiff challenges, at least on the financial front. It has swapped out old IOUs for new IOUs, converted debt (IOUs) into equity (shares of stock), sold off assets in other basins–a whole lotta stuff to keep on drilling (see our 
Crazy Bernie Sanders (yes THAT Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator from Vermont) along with ultra-radical 350.org and its leader Bill McKibben, have launched a new campaign called Fossil Free. It’s actually “thinking free” (as in the absence of all thinking), but we’ll leave that for another post. The new campaign is the ultimate outcome of global warming belief metastasized. Bernie, who is a political rock star for naive young Millennials, appeared with several other speakers at an event in Washington, D.C. that was live streamed to more than 300 “watch parties” across the country. The theme of the campaign is to end the use of all fossil fuels. One of the watch parties was a group of students at Penn State. By all accounts, the young skulls full of mush sat there bedazzled by Crazy Bernie–mouths open, drool trickling down the corner of their mouths. They were brainwashed. They worship this almost-octogenarian for who knows why? The problem is, these kids have not been taught to think critically. They accept, at face value, the lies spread by people like Sanders and McKibben. The kids just automatically believe it–like a blind faith–because Bernie says it. Penn State is (or was) a good school. What’s going on that they’re turning out kids who don’t, and won’t, think for themselves? Here’s recap of the Penn State Crazy Bernie “watch party”…
In 2016 the Pennsylvania legislature, over the objections of PA Gov. Tom Wolf, voted to shift $24 million away from a boondoggle program called the PA Alternative Energy Investment Act and into a new program called the Pipeline Investment Program, or PIPE (see 
Ultra Petroleum, based in Houston, TX, is an independent exploration and production (E&P) company mainly focused on drilling in the Green River Basin of Wyoming. Ultra also drills for oil in the Uinta Basin/Three Rivers area in Utah. In addition, Ultra maintains a “non-operated” (someone else does the drilling) position in the Pennsylvania Marcellus shale with leases on 72,000 net acres–no small amount. As recently as May of this year Ultra CEO Michael Watford signaled that the Marcellus acreage is not a drain on their budget, so they would just hold on to it and see what happens (see 
Juniata County just became the fifth central Pennsylvania county to join the SEDA-COG Natural Gas Cooperative. SEDA-COG stands for Susquehanna Economic Development Association – Council of Governments. Collectively, SEDA-COG is a group of 11 central PA counties. The other four counties that belong to the Natural Gas Cooperative include Clinton, Centre, Mifflin, and Perry. So what’s the big deal about this group? In 2013 MDN reported that SEDA-COG was working on an initiative to bring natural gas to more residents and businesses in their collective 11-county region (see 
Penn State University professor Terry Engelder, the geologist who first discovered the potential of the Marcellus (and called “the Father of the Marcellus Shale”) is retiring from Penn State in June. The Marcellus Shale boom, while starting with a single Range Resources well in 2004, is largely due to the insights of Engelder. In 2007 he did some “back of the envelope” calculations that showed (first) there is roughly 50 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of recoverable natural gas in the Marcellus. He later revised that number, to 489 Tcf. It was Engelder’s calculations that caught the interest and confidence of drillers who then decided to give the Marcellus a try. The rest is history–and we have Dr. Engelder to thank. Penn State News does a good job in providing a tribute to celebrate the contributions of Engelder to the university’s geosciences department. What will Engelder miss the most when he retires? Finding new shale layers? Figuring out new techniques to extract oil and gas? Maybe a better way of predicting earthquakes? Nope. He’ll miss the people–students and the professors/staff at “one of the finest geosciences departments in the world.” Here’s a proper sendoff for a key figure, a giant in the canon of the Marcellus story…