27 New Shale Well Permits Issued for PA-OH-WV Jan 22 – 28
There were 27 new permits issued to drill in the Marcellus/Utica during the week of Jan. 22 – 28, versus 20 permits issued during the prior week. Pennsylvania issued 19 new permits last week. Ohio issued 5 new permits. West Virginia issued 3 new permits last week. Olympus Energy scored the most new permits with 7, all of them in Westmoreland County, PA. Apex Energy came in second with 6 new permits, also in Westmoreland. In fact, Westmoreland County, in southwestern PA, received 15 new permits last week, by far the most of any county.
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Yesterday, Shell’s new CEO, Wael Sawan, spilled some major beans about the company’s ethane cracker in Monaca (Beaver County), Pennsylvania. Sawan’s comments about the cracker came during a quarterly conference call with analysts to discuss the company’s performance during the fourth quarter of 2023. Until yesterday, Shell had steadfastly declined to disclose how much money it spent to build the Monaca ethane cracker facility. Sawan said yesterday the number was a massive $14 billion, far more than the estimated $6-$10 billion that had been bandied about for years.
Hopefully, we’re near the end of an effort to overturn a bill passed in early 2022 by the West Virginia legislature, Senate Bill (SB) 694, which finally brought forced pooling for shale wells to the Mountain State after eight years of trying (see
Well, this was predictable. In fact, we predicted it! We’re talking about today’s announcement that radicalized left Democrat members of the New York legislature, including Assemblywoman Donna Lupardo (from Endicott) and Senator Lea Webb (from Binghamton), are introducing a bill to ban so-called CO2 fracking in the state. A group of leftist Democrats were joined this morning by movie star Mark Ruffalo (a really dumb person) to announce the bill to ban all forms of fracking in the Empire State.
On Monday, we told you the mayor of Chester, PA (a suburb of Philadelphia), Stefan Roots, boldly proclaimed that an LNG export project planned for his community called Penn LNG is “dead in the water” (see
We’ve talked plenty in recent months about the problems in the Red Sea with Iran’s puppets, the Houthis, trying to hijack ships, and (lately) lobbing bombs at ships sailing through the region. Those ships include LNG (liquefied natural gas) and LPG (liquefied petroleum gas, or propane) carriers. The result is predictable: Ships have stopped using the Red Sea and the Suez Canal that connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: Senators: Biden’s LNG pause hurting W.Va.; NATIONAL: Senate confirms nominee to lead EPA’s climate & clean air office; Documentary duo strike gold with DC climate trial ‘verbatim podcast’; INTERNATIONAL: Enbridge Gas open season for peak storage bids at Dawn Hub; Oil drops on conflicting reports of war ceasefire; WoodMac, Standard Chartered look at Biden LNG export pause.