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Weekly Shale Drilling Permits for PA, OH, WV: Feb 8-12
All three M-U states received permits to drill new shale wells last week. Pennsylvania received 16 new permits. Ohio received 3 new permits. And West Virginia received 4 new permits.
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Last week Pennsylvania issued 21 new shale well drilling permits scattered across both northeast and southwest PA. Ohio issued 5 new shale well permits, all of them to the same company and the same well pad. West Virginia issued 3 new shale well permits, all in different counties.
Tomorrow the Harrison County Commission will consider (and most likely approve) an extension for an option to purchase property at the site of a proposed natural gas-fired power plant in Harrison County. Energy Solutions Consortium (ESC) currently has an option to buy the site of a proposed 550-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant, but the option expires on Dec. 31 of this year.
Ryan Energy Services
EQT announced yesterday it has closed on a deal to sell “certain non-strategic assets” to Diversified Gas & Oil (DGO) for $125 million, plus another potential $20 million later on. MDN first told you about this deal on May 13 (see 
Last Wednesday the West Virginia Supreme Court issued a consolidated opinion lumping together seven similar lawsuits filed by Antero Resources and CNX Resources against the WV state tax commissioner and the Doddridge County Commission. The lawsuits take issue with the way gas well valuations are calculated for property taxes.
Saudi Arabia is sniffing around the Marcellus Shale. Bloomberg reports that super secret talks are happening between Saudi Aramco (largest oil company in the world, owned by the Saudi government) and Equinor, which until recently was called Statoil. Equinor is majority-owned by the government of Norway. The Saudis are considering “buying a stake” in or possibly a joint venture with Equinor. It seems Norway is hesitant to hop into bed with the Saudis. We don’t blame them.
Energy Solutions Consortium (ESC), based in Buffalo, NY, will begin construction on West Virginia’s very first Marcellus gas-fired electric generating plant sometime “this summer.” The exact date has not yet been set, but should be announced soon. However, in a bit of a surprise (for us), the state’s first natgas-fired plant to get built will not be (as we thought) in Brooke County. Instead, it will be in Harrison County.
Yesterday MDN began our lead story about a big fine for Antero Resources by saying, “This has to be a record-high amount for a fine plus remediation work, at least in the Marcellus/Utica.” We humbly admit we were wrong. In checking our records, we found that in a similar case from 2014, Trans Energy paid even more, quite a bit more. We researched what this whole business is about, why Antero and others were fined, interviewing a top Antero official, and we now have a far better understanding of what happened and why.
This has to be a record-high amount for a fine plus remediation work, at least in the Marcellus/Utica. Antero Resources has cut a deal with three government entities–the U.S. Dept. of Justice, federal Environmental Protection Agency, and West Virginia Dept. of Environmental Protection–to pay a $3.15 million fine and spend another $8 million to mitigate and restore 32 sites in West Virginia.
Three years ago lawsuits filed by some 200 West Virginia residents against Antero Resources were combined into a class action lawsuit (see 
We thought that all of Mountain Valley Pipeline’s (MVP) permits issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for stream and wetland crossings had been pulled in both West Virginia and Virginia, but alas, no. One of the regions where permits issued by the Army Corps (called NWP 12 permits), in the northern panhandle of WV, is issued by a different Army Corps district office (in Pittsburgh). That office has now revoked MVP’s permits in Wetzel and Harrison counties–another 59 stream and 62 wetland crossings. Which now makes it complete: MVP cannot engage in any construction across/under/near any river, stream, or wetland in *all* of WV and *all* of VA. That is, until they get the NWP 12 permit reworked and reissued.
In early 2017, Baker Hughes (prior to GE buying them) spun off its North American shale fracking business (“pressure pumping”) into a new, standalone company called BJ Services (see