ME2 Pipe Work in Chester County Shut Down (Again) Following Leaks
Hypersensitive: excessively or abnormally sensitive. That’s the word we would use to describe what’s happening in Chester County, PA–a suburb of Philadelphia–with regard to underground horizontal directional drilling work (HDD) being performed by Sunoco Logisitics Partners on the Mariner East 2 pipeline project. The company keeps having “inadvertent returns”–which we call leaks. Drilling mud (bentonite) used to cool the drill bit goes down the hole, and sometimes it pops back up on the surface in a different place from where it went down. Since the drilling mud is non-toxic clay and water (same stuff used to make kitty litter, toothpaste and lipstick), it’s no big deal. Unless there’s thousands of gallons of it turning up in a creek where it can smother fish and aquatic life. There’s cracks in the ground near the surface and sometimes the mud leaks out of those cracks. Sunoco must track leaks of down to less than one gallon. Antis look at the numbers and make wild claims that the pipeline has leaked “over 100 times” since drilling began. While technically true, many of those leaks are nothingburgers–not worth tracking or talking about (a few gallons at most). However, some of the leaks are big and yes, those do need talking about. Over the past week or so another four leaks have occurred in Chester County, totaling 8,000 gallons. Fortunately none of it ended up in a creek. Because of the leaks, the state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) has, once again, shut down any further HDD work in Chester County…
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NOTE: A previous version of this post reported a total price of $3.2 million, now changed to account for the addition of an extra $2.4M for required SEPs. See below.
This is almost beyond words. Earlier this week MDN reported that arrest warrants had been issued for a 61 year-old woman and her daughter sitting 30 feet up in the top of a tree that needs to come down to make way for the Mountain Valley Pipeline (see 
The Penn State campus in Erie County (called Penn State Behrend) has been tapped by the PA Dept. of Community and Economic Development (DCED) to be the “lead partner” for developing business and market opportunities for the state related to the mighty $6 billion Shell ethane cracker–currently under construction in Beaver County. Erie County where Behrend is located is certainly not next door to the cracker, not nearly as close as some other Penn State campuses. So why was Behrend selected? In a word, plastics. “The strength of Erie’s plastics industry and the success of Penn State Behrend’s School of Engineering, which offers one of only six accredited U.S. plastics undergraduate programs, makes Erie of particular interest to DCED.” According to DCED’s Denise Brinley, senior energy adviser, “Penn State Behrend can provide critical connections to research support, materials testing and a talent pipeline that will add value to this large-scale petrochemical investment and associated growth in the plastics sector.” Penn State is kicking in a $250,000 grant to their Energy University Partnership for oil and gas strategies, to help prime the pump…
MDN reported two weeks ago that a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi wants to build a huge, new $1.5 billion natural gas-fired electric generating plant in the Meadowlands (New Jersey), just outside of New York City (see 
As supporters of the fossil fuel industry, we must deal with the issue of catastrophic, man-made global warming head-on. Our kids now grow up believing this lie, and they turn into activists demanding action–sometimes to the point of violence–in support of this lie. We recently read an opinion column by a young woman who appears to be bright, earnest, talented, dedicated–and she believes the lies taught to her about fossil fuels and their role in society. She recently protested in Albany, willing to risk arrest, all in the name of demanding Gov. Cuomo end the use of all fossil fuels in New York State. She’s deathly afraid (we’d call it a phobia) of a common occurrence: the construction and operation of a natural gas-fired power plant in Orange County, NY. What this young woman apparently doesn’t understand is that New York would be plunged back into the Dark Ages if we were to forgo all fossil fuel use–as she is demanding via her protests. Wall Street would move to another state with no electricity to operate its computer networks. Disease and death would be rampant throughout the state. Reliable electricity (used to charge the phone she uses to snap selfies of her protest marches and arrests) would be a thing of the past. It’s really quite sad that this young woman has been completely and incontrovertibly miseducated. Lied to. Education malpractice. The real shame is that she parades her abject ignorance for the world to see. The miseducation of our youth–the intentional lies told to them about man-made global warming, must stop…
The “best of the rest”–stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading: More pipelines equals less gas price volatility; CenterPoint’s pricey Vectren deal shows allure of natgas; gas plant costs down significantly from 2014; oil frackers say $70 oil is the reward for patience; Halliburton says fracking intensity causing equipment to wear out faster; Trump’s revenge – U.S. oil flooding Europe, dinging OPEC & Russia; China’s natgas crises; and more!