ODNR Seeks $6M from Austin Master Services to Cover Cleanup Costs
One of the significant stories of 2024 in the Ohio Utica was about Austin Master Services (AMS), a radiological waste management solutions company in Martins Ferry (Belmont County), Ohio, that handles fracking waste (trucks it for disposal). AMS ran into trouble when it ran out of money. The Martins Ferry facility where waste is temporarily stored went from a permitted maximum of 600 tons of stored waste to over 10,000 tons, in violation of its permit. The Ohio Attorney General’s office filed a lawsuit against the company in March to force compliance. Local newspaper The Times Leader, in doing a Top 10 stories of the year, provides an update on AMS and where things stand with the cleanup. Read More “ODNR Seeks $6M from Austin Master Services to Cover Cleanup Costs”
A leftist anti-fossil group calling itself Protect PT (Penn-Trafford), located in Westmoreland County, PA, backed with big money from Big Green groups, has for years challenged Penn Township ordinances that allow Apex Energy and Huntley & Huntley (now Olympus Energy) to drill and operate shale wells. Protect PT finally struck out (legally) at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in May 2020 (see 
DT Midstream (DTM), headquartered in Detroit, owns major assets in the Marcellus/Utica region and in other regions, such as Haynesville. In November, DTM announced it had cut a deal to buy three FERC-regulated interstate pipelines from Oklahoma-based ONEOK, Inc. for $1.2 billion (see 
In typical sleazy politician fashion, PA’s Democrat Governor, Josh Shapiro, is blaming someone else (the PJM grid operator, in this case) for problems that he and his predecessor have created. Shapiro recently filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) alleging PJM is mismanaging the grid and using inflated numbers that will cause economic pain for the 65 million customers who buy electricity in the PJM region. What’s causing the high prices in PJM, a region rich in natural gas? That would be former Gov. Tom Wolf and current Gov. Josh Shapiro insisting the state tax gas-fired power plants via the so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). 
This is your friendly (somewhat snarky) semi-regular reminder from MDN that the PTT ethane cracker project in Ohio is dead (see 
We’ll be blunt. Incoming Republican Attorney General Dave Sunday is already a disappointment for us. He recently posted details of his transition team to a special website. The co-chair of the transition effort is former RINO Governor Tom Corbett. That’s one strike. While there are several good members on the Energy & Environment Committee, Corbett and Sunday have included a radical anti-fossil fueler from the far-left PennFuture organization on the Energy Committee. How utterly disappointing (and a second strike). 
It’s a mass exodus of U.S. big banks leaving the awful Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), a group of woke banks managed by the equally terrible United Nations. The NZBA is all about defunding fossil fuels. The UN apparently didn’t get the memo that the U.S. has reversed course and now supports fossil energy. Over the past month or so, the following banks have quit their membership in the NZBA: Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo. 
NATIONAL: Improved efficiency is enabling record U.S. crude oil production from fewer rigs; Trump tells EU to buy more American-made oil and gas or face ‘tariffs all the way’; Ample supply, slow demand to temper oil price gains in 2025; Biden to ban more offshore oil drilling before Trump arrives; Antis launder donor-funded research through the Nat’l Academy of Sciences; INTERNATIONAL: GlobalData says digitalization could deliver long term benefits to oil, gas; Ukraine receives 1st shipment of US LNG.