| | |

Norse Energy Special Shareholder Appeal – Sneak Preview

sneak previewOn July 5, Norse Energy Corp will hold what they call an “Extraordinary General Meeting” (EGM) for shareholders in Oslo, Norway. Norse Energy’s CEO Mark Dice will present to shareholders using the PowerPoint embedded below. MDN has included a rundown of what’s in the slides.

For better or worse, Norse has most of its investments in leases in New York State, and the now four-year long delay in adopting new drilling rules, called the SGEIS, has strained the company’s resources. They’ve refinanced debt, sold off assets, taken on investors and have done whatever they can to “hang in there” until drilling finally begins in New York. The slides in the presentation show just how key New York’s decision is to Norse’s future.

Continue reading

|

Al “Crucify Them” Armendariz Goes to Work for Sierra Club

Where do former EPA officials go after they’ve been outted as extremist anti-drillers—so extreme even the head honchos in Obama’s EPA can’t stomach them anymore? Why, the Sierra Club, of course!

You may remember the rightful furor over comments made public by then-EPA Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz about how his philosophy on the enforcement of EPA regulations against drillers is to find a few and make examples of them. You know, like the Romans used to do when they entered a village and crucified the first five men they found. His extremist comments, when finally revealed several years after the fact, led to his dismissal (see this MDN story).

Continue reading

| | | |

NY and Compulsory Integration – MDN Agrees with Slottje (!)

David Slottje and his wife Helen are both lawyers funded in part by the Park Foundation (in Ithaca, NY) to run around trying to convince local town boards in New York to ban hydraulic fracturing. They are, in a word, the enemies of landowner property rights. They seek to deny landowners who want to lease their land for gas drilling the right to do so.

So when MDN read an editorial (not surprisingly) in the Ithaca Journal written by David Slottje that makes reference to the rumored plan by Gov. Cuomo to allow limited drilling in five counties as being “devastating” to landowner property rights, it was a laugh-out-loud moment. The height of hypocrisy and arrogance to say landowner rights will be devastated by the very person doing the most to devastate them.

But what wasn’t so funny was that getting beyond the rank hypocrisy and looking at the substance of what Slottje wrote, MDN had to agree with his viewpoint—on this one particular issue.

Continue reading

| | | | | |

Altela Set to Open 2 New Frack Wastewater Plants in PA

Two new fracking wastewater treatment plants will come online in Pennsylvania on August 1st—one in Clarion County, the other in McKean County. As MDN reported back in November, Altela Inc. will use a distillation process to purify fracking wastewater, a “green” alternative instead of chemically treating the water (see this MDN story).

The new news is that Altela is almost ready to open two new plants using their green technology.

Continue reading

|

Magnum Hunter’s Marcellus Production Curtailed from Storm

You may or may not have heard about the severe thunderstorms that moved through the mid-Atlantic region last Friday afternoon. It resulted in 1.3 million people in Washington, D.C., Maryland and northern Virginia losing power. Some of them still don’t have power and won’t until later this week.

But what you may not realize is that the same storm also had a noticeable effect on the Marcellus Shale industry. The storms didn’t just stop around D.C.—they kept on going—right into the heart of Marcellus country. And the power outage caused problems for at least one driller, Magnum Hunter, who issued a press release with an update on the status of their operations in the region.

Continue reading

| | | |

The Inverse Relationship of Coal and Natural Gas

A heartrending editorial in the Charleston Gazette tells about recent massive layoffs in the West Virginia coal industry. While there’s mention of Obama’s war on coal (and make no mistake, it’s a real war on coal by the global warmists), the editorial puts most of the “blame” on the rise of cheap natural gas, brought about by hydraulic fracturing of shale.

Continue reading