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MDN Weekly Update – Jan 15, 2012: Drilling in NY?

poll resultsLast week’s MDN poll asked if it’s now time to force the issue with New York’s DEC by suing the state to force them to release drilling regulations and allow fracking to begin. A surprising number of MDN readers think it is time to sue. 

Is it time for NY landowners & drilling supporters to sue NY state to allow drilling to begin?

Yes (78%, 233 Votes)
No (17%, 50 Votes)
Not sure (5%, 17 Votes)

Total Voters: 300

This Week’s Poll: Drilling in NY – When?

Wednesday of this past week saw the “final” deadline to file comments with New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) on proposed new drilling regulations, called the SGEIS (see this MDN story). According to Joe Martens, Commissioner of the DEC, it will take as much as five months to analyze and respond to the all of the comments received. And he said that about a month ago when there were fewer than 20,000 comments. The final number of comments that were filed by Wednesday midnight turned out to be more than 40,000, including a 26-page critique by none other than the federal EPA (see this story).

In June 2011 MDN conducted a poll asking readers when they thought horizontal hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus Shale would begin in New York. At that point, the year 2011 was one of the choices and 19 percent of intrepid MDN readers picked it (see this recap of the voting). Now that the final final final DEC comment period is over (pretty soon we’ll need to use exponents after the word “final” to denote how many times it’s been called final), it’s time to ask readers once again to prognosticate on when they believe drilling will begin. Will it be 2012? 2013? Never? Register your vote on the right-hand side of any page.

Below are the most recent “top 5” lists and the calendar of Marcellus-related events for the next two weeks.

Happy reading,
Jim Willis, Editor

P.S. MDN is working on a new permits report that will be published soon. Keep watching MDN for details in the coming weeks. This new report is better than the last by orders of magnitude!

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