The Tide has Turned Against PA Gov Wolf with Latest Tax Proposal
Once again PA Gov. Tom Wolf is proving himself to be a partisan hack, and certainly not up to the job the good people of Pennsylvania elected him to do. He’s a typical tax and spend liberal (voted the most liberal governor in America by the non-partisan InsideGov, see PA Gov Tom “Severance Tax” Wolf: America’s Most Liberal Governor). Yesterday Wolf unveiled his latest budget proposal. The budget is all interconnected, and a jumbled mess, but the part we’re interested in: He is still pushing for a severance tax. Instead of his original so-called “5%” severance tax on Marcellus Shale production, which according to Democrats at the Pennsylvania Budget Office would really be a 17.3% tax (see PA Official Admits Wolf Severance Tax Highest in Nation @ 17.3%), Wolf has dropped the rate from 5% to 3.5%. But here’s the kicker. Wolf is keeping the extra tax of 4.7 cents per thousand cubic feet AND he will keep the existing impact fee, which has been estimated to equate to a 3.5% to 7% severance tax, depending on the source. ALL of the new tax (presumably not the impact fee, but the new 3.5% + 4.7 cents) would go to education–as a payoff for electing Wolf…
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Shell is currently spending an undisclosed amount of money (millions of dollars) to build a bridge to a site they now own where they may one day build a $2-$3 billion ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, PA (see 
As a general rule, professional actors are some of the most clueless people on the planet. Mark Ruffalo, one of the most clueless of the clueless, was honored at a Pennsylvania college because of it. Ruffalo was honored by Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA (near Harrisburg) with the Sam Rose ’58 and Julie Walters Prize for his environmental cluelessism, er, a, activism. Hey, Ruffalo does a decent job with acting (we enjoy the Avengers movies)–we’ll grant him that. But have you ever noticed the lights are all on with Ruffalo–but nobody’s actually home? Anywho, the awarded Ruffalo, who calls himself “an accidental environmentalist,” will make a trip to Harrisburg today to deliver a letter from “100 organizations” and “25,000 concerned citizens” to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf. The letter will ask Wolf to immediately enact a fracking moratorium in the state. What…radical? No way that will ever happen? Pipe dream? You may have forgetten (but we didn’t) that the Pennsylvania State Democrat Party, before they nominated Wolf to be their leader, adopted an official plank in the party platform calling for the same identical thing (see 
Last week we told you how heartbreaking it is to see well-meaning (but ignorant) county officials in Stokes County, NC pass a three-year moratorium on fracking–repeating the same mistakes made in New York State (see 
For those of us who concentrate on the natural gas (and oil) industry, it’s sometimes easy to forget that CONSOL Energy, with major drilling operations in the Marcellus and Utica Shale, began life and is still one of the country’s largest coal companies. We’ve been telling you for years that the company is transitioning from being a coal company to being a natgas company (see 
FirstEnergy Corp., an electric utility operating in the Appalachian region, announced yesterday they will construct a new substation near Smithfield, WV along with a new two-mile transmission line–in order to send more electricity to a nearby natural gas processing plant. FirstEnergy is spending $63 million to build the new substation and transmission line. The announcement doesn’t name the owner of the natgas processing plant, but we have a guess…
Hybrid Tool Solutions has just sold itself to a venture capital firm by the name of Hastings Equity Partners for an undisclosed amount of money. Hybrid Tool, headquartered in Oklahoma, has major operations in the Marcellus/Utica. The company has a patent pending, unique process for conducting frac plug drill outs. What the heck is that? Along the horizontal section of an underground bore hole, plugs are inserted every so often in order to wall off a section of the pipe where fracking will be done. The plugs divide the pipe into sections so each section can be worked on separately–starting with the section furthest out (the “toe”). After all sections are fracked, a drill is put down the hole to drill out the frac plugs and release the gas to the wellhead, putting the well into production. It is that process of drilling out the frac plugs that Hybrid performs, having done over 800 wells in the Marcellus/Utica over the past two years. By selling themselves (essentially getting new funding), they plan to expand beyond the northeast into other shale plays…
The Center for Liquefied Natural Gas (CLNG) released a new report earlier this week that purportedly shows the global environmental benefits of exporting LNG. The Pace Global-authored report, titled “LNG and Coal Life Cycle Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Emissions” (full copy below) found greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from coal-generated electrical power to be 92 percent to 194 percent higher than from power generated from U.S.-produced LNG in five key international markets. Yes, CLNG is targeting another fossil fuel, coal, to justify itself–which is not a healthy thing in our opinion. Everyone (except 
A story we first brought you back in March continues to play out. Liberty Natural Gas filed a plan back in 2010, prior to the Marcellus Shale revolution, to construct an off-shore LNG import (not export) facility off the coast of New York and New Jersey–in the ocean. A floating LNG facility called the Port Ambrose project. A pipeline would run from the off-shore terminal to Jones Beach, NY and from there would connect to a Transco pipeline lateral. Anti-fossil fuelers who hate and oppose all fracking (indeed all fossil fuel use) are also opposed to this project. So what did Liberty Natural Gas do? They tried to convince the antis that importing gas from Trinidad is better than using nasty, evil, vile “fracked” gas (see 
It’s time to enter the 2016 Northeast Oil & Gas Awards contest! As in previous years, Marcellus Drilling News is pleased to promote the annual Oil & Gas Awards for the northeast, held each year in Pittsburgh. The 2016 event will be held on March 30 and nominations for 25 different categories are now open (see the list below). It costs nothing to nominate your own company–or someone else’s company–for an award. Finalists for each award are asked to sponsor a table at a gala ball/event (that’s how the event is paid for). It’s time to take a shot at having worthy companies–yours or someone else’s–recognized for the good work done in our beloved industry…
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: New York using more fracked gas than ever; OH judge backs NEXUS pipeline; Youngstown mayor against ‘bill of rights’; landowner royalty audits; WV severance tax revenues falling; Josh Fox wants to help oil workers by putting them out of work; FERC commissioner resigns; panic in the pipelines; and more!