EPA Approves Potter County, PA Injection Well, Waiting Now for DEP
An issue that’s been festering for more than two years appears to be coming to a head in western Potter County, PA. In early 2021, Roulette Oil and Gas applied for a Class II Injection Well Permit to drill an injection well in Clara Township. The leftists from Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) immediately began to whisper the siren song of “home rule” into the ears of Clara’s residents (see Clara Twp, PA Considers Illegal Home Rule to Stop Injection Well). Since that time, the federal EPA granted its approval for the project. It’s now over to the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) to issue a final permit, and the locals are not happy that they haven’t “had a say” to try and convince the DEP to deny the permit.
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During a routine inspection conducted earlier this week by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), an inspector discovered two of 12 Repsol wells on a pad in Susquehanna County were (gasp!) venting methane into the atmosphere. Call the methane police! There’s fugitive methane escaping! The wells were drilled in 2016. Apparently, there has been an ongoing issue with these two wells since 2017, when the DEP determined the wells have defective casing and/or cementing.
In 2022, the first full year after emerging from the worldwide COVID pandemic, the U.S. and world economies rocketed. Inflation rocketed too, but that’s a different story. Because of the high price for natural gas and oil last year (in response to Russia illegally invading Ukraine), U.S. shale drillers increased capital expenditure spending by a whopping 54% over what they spent in 2021. What about this year? The analysts at RBN Energy have analyzed the announced spending by 42 shale oil and gas producers (with a market cap of at least $500 million) and find this year, shale drillers will only expand spending by a “modest” 17%. What about spending in the Marcellus/Utica?
In his first two days in office, Joe Biden declared war on the oil and gas industry. One of the first things he did was to revive an interagency working group on the “social cost” of greenhouse gas emissions and directed the issuance of an “interim” cost (see 
We don’t write much about RNG because, quite frankly, it doesn’t interest us. We’d rather punch holes in the ground to get natural gas than cap a manure pile to collect it. There’s a lot of hullabaloo about RNG these days, some of it coming from shale circles (which we find odd). Here’s the thing: If you believe producing and using RNG is going to address the concerns of anti-fossil fuel nutters, you are deeply mistaken. The wacko left that hates fossil fuels, including natural gas, hates RNG too.
New shale permits issued for Mar. 27-Apr. 2 in the Marcellus/Utica dropped quite a bit from the prior week. There were 21 new permits issued in total last week, down from 32 in the prior week. Last week’s tally included 15 new permits for Pennsylvania, 6 new permits for Ohio, and no new permits in West Virginia. Last week the top receiver of new permits was Ascent Resources with 6 new permits, 5 in Jefferson County, OH, and 1 in Harrison County, OH. Chesapeake Energy took the #2 slot with 5 new permits in Bradford County, PA.
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