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Weekly Shale Drilling Permits for PA, OH, WV: Feb 15-19
All three M-U states received permits to drill new shale wells last week. Pennsylvania received 10 new permits. Ohio received 6 new permits. And West Virginia received 3 new permits.
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Eagle Manufacturing, located in Wellsburg, WV, was struggling in the early 2000s. The company makes plastic safety products. Foreign competition was hammering the company (tough to compete with children in China who work in factories for a dollar an hour). The company almost offshored production to China, but decided to stick it out a few more years here at home. And then the Marcellus/Utica Shale miracle happened.
Well that’s disappointing. Earlier this year Energy Solutions Consortium (ESC) asked the State of West Virginia to guarantee a $5.5 million loan for a proposed new shale gas-fired power plant planned for Brooke County which would help them secure even more funding for the project. Several weeks ago the state went one better than the original request and said it would not only guarantee the loan, it would actually make the loan (see 
Somebody lit a fire under drillers in Pennsylvania last week! Or maybe we should say a fire was lit under the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). PA issued 35 new permits last week spread pretty much across the entire state–in the northeast, central, and southwest portions of the state. Ohio, once again, issued no new Utica permits last week. West Virginia issued a single new permit last week.
On Sept. 10, a day after a meeting of the West Virginia Economic Development Authority meeting, we reported (based on media reports) that the Authority had voted to approve a $5.5 million loan guarantee for a proposed new shale gas-fired power plant planned for Brooke County, WV (see 
Justice (with a small “j”) has prevailed in West Virginia. We’ve covered the issue of a proposed new shale gas-fired power plant planned for Brooke County, WV for years. We are down to the wire on some of the final bits needed for this project to advance. One of those bits, the last major hurdle, is a loan guarantee for $5.5 million, covering a tiny part of the financing required to build this nearly $1 billion project. Yesterday the WV Economic Development Authority unanimously approved the loan guarantee.
We should have known that West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice is in league with his fellow coal baron Robert Murray. Officials from Brooke County, WV, where Energy Solutions Consortium is planning to build a $1.25 billion natural gas-fired power plant, are blaming the long fingers of Bob Murray for a last-minute delay of a state loan guarantee that was supposed to be made in August (see 
What is wrong with West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice? Last week we told you about Justice trash-talking a proposed natural gas-fired electric plant planned for Brooke County (see 
