Penn Twp Blocks Apex Energy Well Pad Request, What Next?
How do you prove a negative? You can’t. But that’s the (illegal) demand Penn Township (near Pittsburgh) is placing on Apex Energy. Penn Township’s zoning board has denied Apex permits to begin building a well pad for an eventual nine wells–wells that are fully permitted and permissioned by the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). The Penn Township ordinance “states that drillers have to prove that the drilling site won’t violate Penn Township citizens’ rights to clean air and water.” Apex provided air and water studies showing possible risks from accidental spills, etc.–along with how they will prevent such things from happening. But the zoning board was tone deaf and rejected it. So what’s next? We’ve seen this movie before. Last year a group of anti-drillers took Apex to court to stop drilling on two wells, with the town backing them. Apex’s lawyers roared that the company was losing $70K per day by not drilling, threatening to sue. The town backed down, and Apex drilled the wells…
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The partners in the Constitution Pipeline, including Williams and Cabot Oil & Gas, have come roaring back against Gov. Cuomo and his pusillanimous Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) after the DEC lied last Friday in announcing they would not grant stream crossing permits for the pipeline project. Yesterday Cabot, along with Williams, issued a STRONGLY worded rebuttal that says, in part that the DEC’s “stated rationale for the denial includes flagrant misstatements and inaccurate allegations, and appears to be driven more by New York State politics than by environmental science.” Flagrant misstatements is another way of saying the DEC lied, which is exactly what we said yesterday (see 
In what appears to be an ongoing strategy/trend among exploration and production companies (i.e. drillers), Rex Energy is the latest driller to convert outstanding debt in the form of notes (IOUs) into equity, or stock ownership. Earlier this year Rex, a small Marcellus/Utica driller headquartered in State College, PA, offered to refinance its IOUs so the notes expire later, meaning Rex wouldn’t have to cough up cash sooner to pay off the debt (see 
In a bit of encouraging “this too shall pass,” we spotted an article that says Southwestern Energy Company is actively renewing leases expiring in West Virginia. You may recall that in the fall of 2014 Southwestern purchased 413,000 Marcellus/Utica acres, most of it in West Virginia (see 
The Philadelphia Inquirer has published yet another “it’s really bad in the gas industry” articles–news they obviously delight in sharing. However, amid the bad news of fewer jobs and businesses falling on hard times, we spotted some good news in the article: Seneca Resources continues to operate a single drilling rig in Pennsylvania. It would be easy to idle the rig and layoff the people running it–but they’ve kept it going, to their credit. So we’d like to celebrate a little good news amid plenty of bad news. The excerpted article below highlights the story of the guy supervising that lone, still-operating Seneca rig. Along the way we get some interesting inside details about how long it takes Seneca to drill–and how much money it costs to drill a hole these days compared with just a year or two ago…
Thailand’s largest coal miner, Banpu Pcl, has spent $112 million to buy a 29.4% stake in the Chaffee Corners Joint Exploration Agreement (JEA). JEA is a Marcellus shale drilling joint venture 65.4%-owned and operated by Talisman Energy. What it means is that Talisman has a new partner in their northeast PA Marcellus drilling program. Banpu has hired the former CEO of PTT Exploration and Production Pcl, Thailand’s largest oil and gas explorer, as a director and to advise Banpu on JEA and on the company’s new and developing upstream gas strategy. PTT Exploration and Production is a subsidiary of Thailand’s state-owned PTT Public Company Limited. PTT Global Chemical is another subsidiary of PTT Public Company Limited–and the company proposing to build a $5B+ ethane cracker complex in Belmont County, OH (see 
The long, slow process of “reorganizing” and emerging from bankruptcy just sped up for Magnum Hunter Resources (MHR). The Marcellus/Utica driller filed for bankruptcy protection in December (see 
Two shale industry members of last year’s ill-fated Pennsylvania Pipeline Task Force have pulled the curtain back to reveal what went on behind the scenes. The sausage-making. And it’s not pretty. Two important facts emerge for their disclosures: (1) most of the members of the task force didn’t (and still don’t) know their heads from their rear-ends when it comes to how the natural gas industry actually works, and (2) nothing useful will come from the 658-page report and its 184 recommendations. We previously predicted that outcome when we said, “Silly libs–they never learn. This initiative was never about actually getting anything done. It was always about the optics–to show that radical leftist Tom Wolf (and his lackey John Quigley) actually care about the hoi polloi” (see 
There’s no way to sugarcoat the fact that Stone Energy–an independent oil and natural gas exploration and production company (E&P) headquartered in Lafayette, Louisiana that drills mainly in the Gulf of Mexico but also has a presence in the Marcellus/Utica Shale with 75,000 acres of leases–is inching toward a bankruptcy filing. That’s our take anyway. Last week Stone issued an update for 1Q16 in which they disclose their line of credit with the banks has been reduced from $500 million to $300 million (see 
As MDN pointed out earlier this month, EXCO Resources, once a sizable player in the Marcellus–with 145,000 net acres in the Marcellus and having drilled and operating 124 horizontal Marcellus wells–has pretty much abandoned the Marcellus at this point (see 
And then there were four. The Center for Sustainable Shale Development (CSSD) has fought stiff headwinds from the beginning. The organization was founded by a group of shale industry people and environmentalists reaching across the isle to forge strict standards that both sides can live with. Environmental leftists, like Mamma Teresa Heinz Kerry and her Heniz Endowments, pulled support and have actively worked against the CSSD (see 
As we have long chronicled, a few anti-drilling parents from the Mars School District (Butler County, far western part of the state), backed by a couple of Big Green groups from the other side of the state (THE Delaware Riverkeeper and the Clean Air Council, both based in the Philadelphia area), sued Middlesex Township to stop shale drilling in rural portions of the county. Rex Energy had applied for, was legally permitted for, but wasn’t allowed to drill a series of wells some three-fourths of a mile from the Mars School (for background, see our long list of “Martian” stories