PA Conventional Driller Seeks $25M to Begin Shale Drilling in OH
A Pittsburgh-area investment company with a conventional oil and gas drilling division has decided the time is right to enter the unconventional (shale) drilling game. Bryan Investment Group, which operates Discovery Oil & Gas, LLC, is tapping its investors on the shoulder looking for $25 million to begin drilling in the Clinton/Medina sandstone layer–a rock layer that sits between the Marcellus Shale above it (Devonian group), and the Utica Shale below it (Ordovician group). According to president and general managing partner Richard Bryan, targeting the spaces between good wells drilled in the past is “painstaking work,” but it’s their specialty/niche. Bryan Investment intends to drill new Clinton/Medina wells in “the land between” in a four-county area of northeastern Ohio…
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Two weeks ago the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (MA’s highest court) ruled that utility companies, which are heavily regulated and the prices they can charge controlled, cannot pass along the cost of a pipeline to electric ratepayers (see 
Two radical environmental groups in Ohio–Ohio Environmental Council and the Clean Air Task Force–have just released a 100% bogus “report” that attempts to tie asthma in children to fracking. If lying to the public were a crime, they’d be in jail right now. Here’s how these sleazy groups make such a claim: They claim, from looking at medical records, that there are 7,129 childhood asthma attacks in the Columbus metro area, and 7,558 in the Cleveland metro area each year. Absolutely no context as to whether those numbers are higher or lower than elsewhere in the country, or whether or not the numbers are increasing year over year. These groups just toss out numbers. They claim the asthma attacks are because of smog in those cities. They further claim smog comes from burning oil and gas and ergo, childhood asthma attacks are the result of fracking, because fracking extracts more oil and gas which is burned and causes smog which causes asthma. It is a heaping mound of cow manure. The problem is that otherwise good news sources, like the Akron Beacon Journal, push this manure out as news…
The University of Texas at Austin has just been awarded a $350,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to conduct an 18-month review of a study they previously did of major American shale gas plays. Hey, getting paid to look at what you previously wrote is good work if you can get it! The previous study, called the “Shale Production and Reserve Study” looked at data from the Barnett, Fayetteville, Haynesville, and Marcellus natural gas plays. However, the data reviewed in the original study was only 4-6 years’ worth of data, depending on the play. Since the original study was completed, UTA-Austin now has access to an additional 2-4 years’ worth of data. In other words, the new data will help confirm, or not, the original conclusions. More data, better results and better conclusions. Here’s what UTA-Austin had to say about the new grant…
There is precisely one main reason why the United States produces 40% less carbon dioxide now than it did five years ago. Must be the onslaught of solar, right? Nope. How about wind. Yeah, wind power is coming on strong–I see those ugly windmills all over the place now. Must be wind power, right? Nope. Hydro? Nope. Biomass? Nope. There is only one main reason why we pump less CO2 into the atmosphere (if you care about that sort of thing), and it’s this: because fracked shale gas has replaced coal in electric generating plants. You would think environmentalists would celebrate. They don’t and they won’t, pointing out their uber-hypocrisy…
The “best of the rest” – stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading. In today’s lineup: Farm Bureau organizes NEXUS pipeline meetings in OH; why oil production didn’t tank when oil prices did; North American oil prices still “unsustainable” according to Schlumberger; misleading reports on o&g come in many forms; Shell says gas is the future, it WON’T be traded like oil; and more!