PA AG Criminal Lawsuit Against XTO Energy Dismissed After 4 Yrs
Four years after then-Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane decided to turn an accident into a criminal prosecution against XTO Energy, the final chapter has been written. Anti-drilling Kane attempted to criminalize the accidental spill of a small amount of recycled wastewater by XTO that happened years before she took office (see PA AG Abuses Her Authority, Files Criminal Charges Against XTO). There was an accidental spill of ~50,000 gallons of frack wastewater at an XTO drill site in 2010 in Lycoming County, PA. XTO remediated the site, digging up affected soil, and paid out a $100,000 settlement in 2013. By the time Kane took office, the matter had been over and done for over two years. But Kane wanted/needed a quick way to make a splash with her hardcore left fringe supporters (payback time for money and volunteers), so she re-opened the case and fantastically filed criminal charges saying XTO showed a pattern of brazen disregard for safety, blah blah blah. In 2013, XTO filed to dismiss the Kane lawsuit (see XTO Energy Files to Have AG Kane’s Lawsuit Dismissed). The federal EPA also got into the act and last year XTO settled a violation of the Clean Streams Law and Solid Waste Management Act. Pricetag? Another $300,000. Now that the company has paid out the nose ($400,000 total), U.S. Middle District Judge Matthew Brann yesterday approved a motion filed by the U.S. attorney’s office to end the case. Finally. After four years…
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The sharp folks over at the Pittsburgh Business Times have been looking through data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and have compiled a list of 20 drillers who have at least a dozen shale wells in the southwest PA region. And they ranked them from lowest to highest. We’ve grabbed the list below. The interesting thing for MDN is that there is one name in the list not familiar to us, and we’ve been watching this space since 2009. Always fun to learn something new. Here’s the list of southwest PA’s “Top 20” Marcellus drillers…
This is so unusual, it qualifies as news: Supervisors in Buffalo Township (Butler County), PA have approved a new compressor station to be built by Mountain Gathering–a subsidiary of XTO Energy. The reason it’s news is for how the approval process was handled. Town residents who live near where the station will be built understandably had some concerns. Those concerns were aired. Town officials visited other compressor stations built by Mountain Gathering. They had XTO officials in to answer questions. There was no bleating and blatting, no parading in front of cameras and microphones, no “die-ins” and radical protests. Just deliberative, calm, adult discussions. And at the end of it, the supervisors voted to grant permission for the compressor station to get built. Unusual!…
Just prior to going on trial for committing felonies while in office, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane (Democrat) needed something, ANYTHING, to distract the press from focusing on her own crimes. Since she took office in January 2013, Kane has targeted the Marcellus industry. One of the first high profile cases she manufactured (out of nothing) was to accuse XTO Energy of committing a crime in an accidental spill of a few thousand gallons of frack wastewater–an accident in Lycoming County, PA that happened years before she took office and didn’t have any long-term effects (see 
Everybody loves a list. We do too! We spotted a ranking in a recent issue of the Pittsburgh Business Times that lists the top 37 shale gas producers in southwestern Pennsylvania, based on the amount of gas they produced in 2015. We pulled the names of the top 10, listed in order from most to least…
In a somewhat complicated scam, a former landman for XTO Energy, Steven E. Fisackerly (33 years old) defrauded XTO out of more than $1 million with fake lease deals in the West Virginia Marcellus Shale region. He cooked up bogus documents and passed them off as real, pocketing commissions. He even worked with a supposed/fake mineral rights owner to pocket kickbacks from lease payments sent to the fake rights owner. It was elaborate and convoluted–and ultimately stupid. Fisackerly plead guilty in May and will enter prison on January 4. His sentence? Pay back more than $1 million he defrauded from XTO, and serve 63 months (over 5 years) in federal prison…
Not long after she took office, Pennsylvania’s Democrat Attorney General, Kathleen Kane, brought criminal charges against XTO Energy for an accidental spill in Lycoming County, PA that happened two years before she was in office (see 
An update on a royalty lawsuit we first reported in July. Two Butler County, PA landowners with a combined 245.7 acres of land leased to (and drilled by) XTO Energy have sued XTO claiming the company is breaking the lease agreement by paying royalties below 1/8 of what XTO receives in revenue for the gas (see 
Yesterday the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection announced an agreement/settlement with three Marcellus drillers operating in the northeastern portion of the state. The three–Chesapeake Energy, XTO Energy and SWEPI (i.e. Shell) were fined a collective $374,481 for methane migration related to their drilling activities at three locations (three different counties) in 2011 and 2012. The bad news is that 13 private water wells between the three incidents were negatively affected, along with several local creeks. The good news is that the problems are all fixed. Methane migration is an eminently fixable condition. Here are the details for each fine, including what happened and where it happened…
Two Butler County, PA landowners with a combined 245.7 acres of land leased to XTO Energy have sued XTO claiming that XTO is breaking the lease agreement by paying royalties below 1/8 of what XTO receives in revenue for the gas. So far we’ve heard about Chesapeake Energy being the focus of these types of lawsuits for their shenanigans of inflating post-production costs from the pipeline company and then receiving a “kick back” of investments by the same pipeline company (see