Beaver County | Energy Companies | Hydraulic Fracturing | Industrywide Issues | PennEnergy Resources | Pennsylvania | Regulation
Dem PA Lawmaker Wants to Block Use of Creek Water for Fracking
A Pennsylvania Democrat lawmaker from Beaver County (southwestern PA) who professes to support the Marcellus industry, Rep. Rob Matzie, has written a letter to Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary Pat McDonnell (a fellow Dem) asking him to deny a request by PennEnergy Resources to withdraw as much as 3 million gallons of water a day from Big Sewickley Creek and one of its tributaries for shale fracking. Matzie says that’s just too much water to withdraw from the creek.
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You can’t miss all the chit-chat coming from the oil and gas industry (particularly drillers) about being “net carbon zero” by such-and-such a date–typically by 2025. Or maybe 2030. CNX Resources, an independent natural gas driller (and midstream company) based in Pittsburgh, released its annual corporate social responsibility (CSR) report for 2020 yesterday. CNX continues to walk the talk when it comes to ESG (environmental, social, governance)–one of the few (only?) companies to do so. Get this: CNX has been net carbon *negative* (pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere) for its Scope 1 and 2 operations since 2016! It is the only E&P we’re aware of that can make that claim. Everyone else is still trying to get to net carbon zero, let alone net carbon negative as CNX has done.
For all the chatter about ESG and environmental yada yada, at the end of the day every Marcellus and Utica driller drills for and extracts hydrocarbons. Fossil fuels. As the de facto leader of all natural gas drillers, it’s important and instructive to watch what EQT and its young CEO, Toby Rice, actually do AND say. EQT and Rice are leading the charge to defend our industry against the crazies who want to end the use of all fossil fuels. In a recent column appearing in a West Virginia newspaper, Rice makes the case that natural gas is good for the economy and good for the environment.
New permit activity once again picked up last week after the previous week showed a paltry number of permits. In Pennsylvania 10 new permits were issued, all but one of them in the northeastern dry gas area of the state. In Ohio 4 new permits were issued, all of them for the same driller on the same well pad. And in West Virginia, 7 new permits were issued. One of the permits appears to be issued to a private landowner drilling his own shale well! And in another oddity, four WV permits were issued to a midstream company.
In January of this year, EQT Corporation announced it would partner with a Denver, CO company calling itself “Project Canary” to run a test on two of its shale gas pads, to prove the natural gas produced is “certified responsibly sourced” (see 
A new study prepared for Shell Chemical Appalachia earlier this year is just coming to light now. The study, researched by professors at Robert Morris University (RMU), calculates the impact on the Pennsylvania economy from the soon-to-be-completed Shell ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, PA. The numbers are staggering. Each and every year that cracker operates RMU projects the cracker will create $3.7 billion throughout the PA economy. Amazing! And it’s ALL private money–no government transfers from one taxpayer to another. Joe Biden should be jumping up and down and extolling this from the rooftops! Instead, he’s attacking fossil fuels.
A relatively short jury trial last week in a Belmont County, OH court resulted in a quick, three-and-a-half-hour decision in favor of a landowner against Rice Drilling (now EQT) and Gulfport Energy in a trespass case. The jury awarded the landowner, Tera LLC (owned by Thomas Shaw), a $40 million judgment. It’s believed to be the single largest jury award in Belmont County history.
Seneca Resources Company, the exploration and production subsidiary of National Fuel Gas Company (NFG), is the latest company to jump on the ESG (environmental, social, governance) bandwagon. Seneca is partnering with NexTier Oilfield Solutions, an oilfield services company that fracks and completes wells for companies like Seneca, to study the carbon emissions that come from fracking shale wells.
According to an analysis done by S&P Global Market Intelligence, the five largest drillers in the Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale resumed their drilling in June in a big way. S&P’s analysis shows those five drillers were responsible for 51% of the new drilling permits issued last month, up from 28% of new permits issued in May. Perhaps we know why. The price of natgas at regional hubs in PA rocketed over the past month. At the Leidy Hub in the northeast’s dry gas window (centered on Susquehanna County, PA), cash prices went from a low of 93.7 cents/MMBtu on May 3 to $3.07/MMBtu at the end of June.
An analyst writing on the Seeking Alpha investors website confirms our concerns over the potential merger between Marcellus driller Cabot Oil & Gas and Permian driller Cimarex Energy (see 
Diversified Energy (née Diversified Gas & Oil) continues to expand *outside* of the Marcellus/Utica region. In April the company announced it had purchased ~780 net operated wells and leases in the Cotton Valley/Haynesville region of Lousiana for $135 million (see 
Last week MDN told you that EQT Corporation, the largest natural gas driller in the U.S., had released its 2020 ESG report and announced the company would be “net carbon zero” by 2025 or sooner (see