Marcellus & Utica Shale Story Links: Wed, Jun 26, 2013

The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading:

New York

Activists Try Leveraging New York with SRBC and DEP Complaint
Natural Gas Now
The anti-gas crowd, desperate to avoid bringing any economic hope to upstate New York, is at it again with a hapless letter to the governor and the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) suggesting New York use its position on the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) to go after Pennsylvania. It’s a transparent attempt to take the edge of the Commonwealth’s success. Pennsylvania’s good fortunes have become increasingly embarrassing to Governor Andrew (Lady MacBeth) Cuomo as he tries to avoid deciding on whether or not to allow high-volume hydraulic fracturing in his state while the Southern Tier disintegrates economically.

Fracking Opponents Benefit from State Land Deals
Natural Gas Now
How do the major groups involved in fighting fracking and natural gas development in New York finance their activities? Well, they have a lot of money at the outset from the Park and Rockefeller families, but they also have special arrangements with the State of New York that allow them to do very profitable land deals.

Ohio

Tour the Utica shale play
Columbus Business First
Energy companies are betting big on potential oil and natural gas riches in the Utica shale play, risking $8 million to $9 million in drilling costs per well with no guarantee of a payoff down the line. That was one of the many things I learned Thursday during a tour of the Utica play at sites around the Marietta area in southeast Ohio. I tagged along with a group of 40 science teachers who attended a two-day workshop presented by the Ohio Oil & Gas Energy Education Program.

June 28 is deadline for veterans seeking drilling scholarships
Akron Beacon Journal
ShaleNET wants Veterans, and a key application deadline for scholarships specifically for Veterans is fast approaching. Former service members interested in applying for a scholarship to train for a career in the growing natural gas industry are encouraged to submit applications before June 28 to www.shalenet.org/.

Pennsylvania

NWPOA to DRBC: Stop Obfuscating and Start Delivering
Natural Gas Now
The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) has, as many readers know, simply opted to sit on already drafted regulations of natural gas drilling in the basin since September, 2011, in a stunning display of government malfeasance that throws the Constitutional rights of every Upper Delaware region landowner down to the ground and stomps all over them. The Northern Wayne Property Owners Alliance (NWPOA) is fighting back to reclaim our rights as property owners. We issued a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) demand to the agency, which was blithely rejected by their FOIA officer, appealed that decision and got an acknowledgment from the Commission Secretary that we were, in fact entitled, to much of the information we had requested, although she did everything possible to make securing of it a daunting task.

WACTC breaks ground for new welding center
Washington Observer-Reporter
In about six months, Western Area Career and Technology Center will open a new welding shop building that will help the school and the area meet a burgeoning demand for welders that began several years ago and shows no signs of letting up. During groundbreaking ceremonies for public officials Tuesday morning – participants were handed gold welding masks in place of traditional hard hats – Dr. Joe Iannetti outlined plans for a new 11,500-square-foot building that will train students in welding, fabrication and machining for the center’s manufacturing cluster.

National

Obama Declares War On Coal, Embraces Pipeline
Forbes
President Obama launched a ‘war on coal’ in his climate change action plan, released early this morning and addressed from Georgetown University this afternoon. In 2008, Obama warned that his policies would bankrupt anyone who started a coal power plant, and today this controversial policy will begin to impact America’s middle class.

GOP Slams Obama’s ‘War on Coal’
U.S News & World Report
Republicans are taking the offensive and accusing President Obama of waging a “war on coal” and a “war on jobs” with his new proposals to reduce carbon emissions and limit climate change. Obama unveiled his proposals Tuesday in a speech at Georgetown University that set off a firestorm of criticism from conservatives and triggered a strong defense from environmentalists. “I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing,” the president said. “And that’s why today I’m announcing a new national climate action plan.”

Frack Music Attracts Halliburton to Submarine Spy Tool
Bloomberg
A gossamer-thin glass line threaded two miles underground is allowing oilfield engineers to listen to a new kind of music: the sounds of fracking. Halliburton Co. and competing providers of drilling gear are adapting acoustic spy technology used by U.S. submarines to record sounds made deep in the earth that can guide engineers in finishing a well and predicting how much oil will flow.

International

Top 10 Myths and Facts about Shale Gas
Natural Gas Now
Nick Grealy, a friend who runs two shale gas websites in the UK, addresses some of the prevailing myths about shale gas in certain circles, dispensing each rather readily. His European perspective will provide some valuable insights for our readers.