Rig Bloodbath Continues – Pennsylvania Loses 7 Rigs in 3 Weeks
Hidden in last Friday’s weekly Baker Hughes official rig count is a big story happening in the Marcellus/Utica. From the 30,000-foot level, Friday’s latest rig count report appeared just fine. The national rig count, which counts all oil and gas rigs, added an astonishing eight rigs to the count after languishing for months — the biggest weekly gain in a year. Very nice. The M-U count maintained at 33, down from a few weeks ago, but still not completely terrible. But then you open the hood and look at the engine, and something startling happens. Pennsylvania is losing rigs, bleeding rigs, like crazy—four rigs gone in the last two weeks. And West Virginia is gaining those lost rigs. Typically, there’s no one answer as to why these things happen. Our best guess is that Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), coming online from the northern panhandle of WV to southern Virginia, carrying natgas to markets outside the immediate region for higher prices, has much to do with this realignment.
Read More “Rig Bloodbath Continues – Pennsylvania Loses 7 Rigs in 3 Weeks”
We spotted a report about an aboveground pipeline that flows shale wastewater that sprung a leak and released an estimated 12,600 gallons of brine (salty water from deep below the surface) on the ground in Gilmore Township, Greene County, PA. The pipeline is owned by EQM Gathering, another name for Equitrans Midstream, which is now owned by EQT. The leaking pipeline connects to the Trust Well Site owned by EQT. It sure sounds like a serious spill (12,600 gallons) with the potential to contaminate local water supplies—until you dig into the state Dept. of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) report on the incident. 
A couple of interesting developments with the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), which, unlike its dysfunctional cousin, the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), the SRBC continues to allow water withdrawals to supply water for shale fracking in northeastern Pennsylvania. The first development is that over the weekend (on Saturday), the SRBC Hydrologic Conditions Monitor showed low stream flows in some areas that triggered water withdrawal restrictions for water users, including seven shale gas water withdrawal locations (most of them for driller Repsol). The other development is that two days earlier, on Thursday, the SRBC approved new water withdrawal requests for 22 new projects, including eight from shale drillers! 
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) wants to spend some of the $214+ million it’s receiving from the federal government’s Phase 1 & 2 program to plug orphaned conventional oil and gas wells on a research project to determine the potential health impacts of living near such wells. You may recall the flawed (totally fake) “research” conducted by the University of Pittsburgh in 2023 that purported to show a connection between shale drilling and childhood cancer clusters (see 
Last week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) highlighted efforts to blend hydrogen (H2) with natural gas (CH4) in power-generating plants. By EIA’s reckoning, ten power plants scattered across the country are either experimenting with mixing hydrogen with natgas right now or soon will. We have covered several of these projects here at MDN, including efforts by the Long Ridge Energy Terminal in Monroe County, OH, to blend Utica shale gas with hydrogen (see 
OTHER U.S. REGIONS: Middle River Power reverses plan to shut 540-MW plant amid record PJM capacity prices; Gas stoves in California may soon come with a tobacco-style health warning label; ExxonMobil hydrogen hub attracts billions from major investors; NATIONAL: FERC greenlights BlackRock’s $12.5B purchase of GIP; Chevron and MOL to install Wind Challenger on LNG carrier; INTERNATIONAL: Aramco inks agreements expanding AI deployment across its operations; The Hague becomes world’s first city to ban oil ads; Gag on climate reporting is another French obscenity.