12 New Shale Well Permits Issued for PA-OH-WV Jun 17 – 23
We didn’t bring you the latest permit numbers on Friday because the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection’s report website was down (again, for the umpteenth time). The site was back online this morning, so we ran our weekly query and discovered PA issued a whopping three permits for the week of June 17-23, all of them issued to Coterra Energy in (gasp) the township of Dimock! Yes, drilling in Dimock is back. Love it! In addition, Ohio issued nine new permits, with seven going to Encino Energy for oil drilling in Guernsey and Harrison counties. Ohio also issued two permits to Ascent Resources in Jefferson County. West Virginia issued no new shale permits for that period.
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Three weeks ago, the owner of Austin Master Services (AMS), American Environmental Partners (AEP), sent a press announcement to MDN to announce he has found a buyer for AMS (see 
The highly functional and responsible Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), unlike its completely dysfunctional and irresponsible cousin, the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), continues to support the shale energy industry by approving water withdrawals for responsible and safe shale drilling. On June 13, the SRBC board approved 19 new water withdrawal requests within the basin, seven of them for water used in drilling and fracking shale wells in Pennsylvania. The Marcellus/Utica shale drillers (and one water company) receiving a green light from SRBC included BKV (3 requests), EQT, Keystone Clearwater Solutions, Seneca Resources, and Southwestern Energy.
Leftists (aka liberals, Communists, socialists, and leaders of the Democrat Party) believe they are smarter than you, they know more than you do, and they should be able to make decisions that affect your life outside of the laws created by duly elected members of Congress. For decades (some 40 years), we in the U.S. have lived under the tyranny of the bureaucratic administrative state following a court decision commonly referred to as the “Chevron deference” case. That case, decided in 1984 (ironic, no?), gave broad powers to federal agencies like the EPA and other executive branch agencies to create, in essence, their own laws (called regulations) without any specific delegation of authority by Congress to do so. It has led to the radical loss of freedom as bureaucratic leftists seized power to enact rules they demand YOU live under. No more! Last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case that nullified and threw out the Chevron deference doctrine. This has HUGE implications for the entire oil and gas industry, including the Marcellus/Utica.
Must be it’s an election year. How do we know? The desperate Democrats are doing their best to distract and focus attention away from the decrepit, mentally impaired Joe Biden by accusing “Big Oil” of conspiring with OPEC to keep oil prices high. Except oil prices aren’t all that high. U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Communist (who pretends to be a Democrat) from Rhode Island, is “demanding” all sorts of internal communications from “Big Oil” companies in a new witch hunt he’s launched into this earth-shattering matter. Sheldon Whitehouse is a LOSER in all capitals.
The U.S. national oil and gas rig count has been in a pattern of free-falling for the past month. Last week, the national combined Baker Hughes oil and gas rig count dropped by another seven to 581, the lowest since December 2021. It’s gone from free-falling to a bloodbath. The Marcellus/Utica stayed the same last week, for the fourth week in a row, with a combined 36 active rigs. Pennsylvania continued to operate 21 rigs. Ohio remained steady with ten active rigs. And West Virginia kept five active rigs.
MARCELLUS/UTICA REGION: DEP solicits bids to plug conventional wells in Allegheny Forest; Surge of power demand means we need natural gas more than ever; NATIONAL: A natural-gas billionaire bets on greener fossil fuel; Study says extra CO2 makes earth greener, food better; US House panel finds Wall St ‘colluded’ to curb emissions.