PA DEP Issues Adelphia Gateway Pipe 401 Water Certificate
Adelphia Gateway is a plan to convert an old/existing 84-mile oil pipeline stretching from Northampton County, PA through Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester counties, terminating in Delaware County at Marcus Hook, into a natural gas pipeline–flowing Marcellus gas to southeast PA. Roughly half of the pipeline was previously converted and already flows natgas. In December the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued final approval for the project (see FERC Issues Final OK for Southeast PA Adelphia Gateway Pipeline). In March 2019 Adelphia filed a request with the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection for a federal Clean Water Act 401 permit to cross streams and wetlands. The DEP finally issued the 401 permit this past week.
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In Ohio forced pooling is called “unitization.” When a landowner/leaseholder owns 65% of the mineral rights under property in a given location and wants to pool other neighboring properties into an oil or gas drilling unit, that landowner/leaseholder files a request with the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management. The Division head then schedules a hearing to consider the request. All such hearings scheduled for this week are now canceled and will be rescheduled. Furthermore, the Division will only be able to accept new unitization requests on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and they will only return phone calls about unitization on Fridays. All due to the COVID-19 coronavirus.
Drilling, whirring, humming, thumping, grinding, engines running, hammering, back-up warning beeps, banging, clanging. Those are the sounds of progress happening in Chester County, PA. Contrary to the griping and moaning mainstream media reports about those who live near Mariner East 2 (ME2) pipeline construction, the sounds of ME2 construction are music for at least one local resident because he knows about the economic prosperity this project will bring to the region.
Electric power generator FirstEnergy (now called Energy Harbor Corp.) pulled off what we consider the biggest case of deception in the history of Ohio by pressuring Ohio legislators and a RINO governor to sign into law a bill to force Ohio residents to pay the company $1 billion so it can keep open two uneconomic/failing nuclear power plants (see 
There is an increasing call from economists to “let the free market” determine who lives and who dies in the oil and gas industry. We won’t lie–we live in dire times. We don’t know what the outcome will eventually be. While the world is gripped in COVID-19 coronavirus panic, the Saudis and Russians have flooded the world markets with oil, forcing the price of oil to collapse. Now our own economists are writing that shale companies already teetering on the brink of bankruptcy should be allowed to go under. Don’t prolong the agony. There were already on the way out. But is that wise?
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Biggest weekly gainer in S&P 500 is Cabot Oil & Gas!; Susquehanna County has more than half of top producing PA gas wells!; OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Developing bottlenecks in the Louisiana gas market; NATIONAL: Oil price recovery not likely until 2022; recent pullbacks ‘just the beginning’; E&Ps, OFS operators cutting capex and salaries as Covid-19 reshapes markets; Four more producers line up to slash capex, activity in wake of low oil prices; Can shale survive another bust?; It’s not Armageddon for America’s oil and gas industry; INTERNATIONAL: Another specter rises over LNG as European demand seen threatened by coronavirus; Saudi Arabia-Russia oil price feud hits U.S. economy hard.