Lebanon County Town Holds 10th Hearing for ME Pump Stations
In June 2020, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court denied hearing an appeal for a case from Sunoco Logistics Partners about a permit for a pump station in Lebanon County, PA used to help flow natural gas liquids through the Mariner East pipeline system (see PA Supremes Rule Against ME1 Pump Station Permit in Lebanon County). The Supremes’ rejection meant a lower court ruling stands that requires a local town permit allowing the pump station to operate. Thing is, that pump station (two buildings, essentially two pump stations) were built years ago, have been and continue to operate, and will not get shut down. Yet West Cornwall Township has gone through the motions (a charade) since last summer of considering whether or not to grant the pump station buildings a permit.
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How does this work in the real world? Gas and electric customers on Aquidneck Island (part of Rhode Island) ran out of natural gas leaving thousands without heat on the island for days during a frigid cold snap in 2019. Customers without heat subsequently launched a class action lawsuit. On Wednesday a judge ruled the lawsuit may continue. Yet RI legislators will not allow the utility, Narragansett Electric (formerly part of National Grid) to implement any permanent fixes (like a new pipeline) to prevent another outage from happening! And it will happen at some point. This is what passes for “justice” in Rhode Island.
It’s interesting to observe how antis twist and turn *any* situation, no matter how obscure and inconsequential, into propaganda that supports their aim to end the use of all fossil fuels. For example, there was a minor, we’d call it routine, incident at a Mariner East 2 pipeline pumping station in Chester County on Monday night. A small leak of methane (natural gas) was detected in the pumping station. The leak was tiny and the gas didn’t even escape the pumping station. Yet antis are attempting to turn this molehill into Mount Everest.
Last fall MDN told you that a Marcellus-fired power plant planned for Clinton County, PA called the Renovo Energy Center, had come back to life as an even bigger project that will produce 1,240 megawatts of electricity when it gets built (see 
It’s been ten long years since Windfall Oil and Gas first floated a plan to drill a shale wastewater injection well near Dubois, in Brady Township (Clearfield County), PA. The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a permit for the well in 2015. The PA Dept. of Environmental Protection approved the project in March 2018 (see 
We never thought we would write these words: The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Joe Biden is even worse than it was under Barack Hussein Obama. Biden’s choice to head the EPA, North Carolina’s Michael Regan, is aggressively targeting natural gas, attempting to harm the industry in any way he can. This week he’s targeted natgas in two specific ways: (1) by encouraging FERC to reclassify new pipeline projects as “stranded assets” meaning they shouldn’t get approved, and (2) by repealing Trump’s rightsizing of Clean Water Act 401 permits, once again allowing states to block pipelines using the 401 permit, thereby harming their neighbors by blocking interstate commerce (in contravention to the U.S. Constitution). Regan is a vicious radical, totally out of control. He’s corrupting not only his own agency, but another agency (FERC) as well.
The state treasurers from all three actively producing Marcellus/Utica states, including Stacy Garrity (PA), Robert Sprague (OH), and Riley Moore (WV), along with the state treasurers from 11 other oil and gas producing states, sent a letter to John Kerry, Biden’s so-called Climate Envoy, telling Kerry and other Biden officials to stop pressuring banks and other financial institutions to divest from fossil fuel companies. The treasurers also issued a warning to those banks and financial institutions letting them know their states (all 14 of them) will collectively pull their money out of those banks and financial institutions–BILLIONS of dollars–if the banks and financial institutions persist in divesting from fossil fuel companies. Fossil fuel haters: BACK OFF!
In an effort to flow more Marcellus natural gas to a starving New York City, Kinder Morgan cut a deal with utility company Consolidated Edison in 2019 to provide more gas by beefing up capacity along its Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP) that feeds NYC, allowing Con Ed to avoid cutting customers off from natgas hookups (see 
Gordon Tomb, a senior fellow at the Commonwealth Foundation (Pennsylvania’s free-market think tank) has some strong words for those want to put all of PA’s energy eggs into the so-called renewables basket: “‘Green’ energy proposals are no economic therapeutic for Pennsylvania. They’re snake oil miracle cures that ignore the realities of physics–and people’s needs.” So begins a column by Tomb. It’s a verbal slap across the face to get the attention of people who either won’t, or can’t, think for themselves about the glaring failures of a policy to convert to all-renewable energy, and what a total conversion would mean for the state (a complete disaster).
In theater of the absurd, yesterday a bunch of sleazy politicians, headed by the grandmaster sleazoloa himself, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, unveiled proposed new anti-Marcellus legislation based on a ginned-up, fake anti-shale grand jury report that Shapiro manipulated and orchestrated last year (see 
Radical environmentalists continue to use the City of Oberlin, Ohio to try and advance their agenda of ending the use of natural gas pipelines. And Oberlin willingly lets them do it. We’re referring to the latest court filing by Oberlin (actually by Big Green lobbyists using Oberlin) contesting the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) decision to approve the NEXUS pipeline, a pipeline from the Utica Shale into Michigan that’s been flowing for years connecting to a pipeline that exports some of the gas into Canada. Oberlin says FERC’s approval of NEXUS is faulty because some gas gets exported and is not “in the public interest.”
The judge in a lawsuit initiated by Cabot Oil & Gas against a Susquehanna County, PA landowner and his lawyers has had it up to here with the ongoing stonewalling and delay tactics by the landowner’s lawyers. “Four years we’ve been spinning our wheels on this nonsense,” the judge said. “The court is extremely frustrated, to put it politely.” The judge bordered on being impolite at a hearing last Thursday…
MDN has been writing about a privately-owned dump near Scranton, the Keystone Sanitary Landfill, for the past decade (
Headquartered in Philadelphia, PECO (a subsidiary of Exelon Corp.) is Pennsylvania’s largest electric and natural gas utility, delivering power to more than 1.6 million electric customers and more than 532,000 natural gas customers in southeastern Pennsylvania. Last fall PECO floated a plan to build a natural gas reliability station in Marple Township (Delaware County, PA) to allow the company to distribute more natural gas into Delaware County through 11.5 miles of new natural gas main lines. As you might expect, the neighbors in the densely populated area of the reliability station are up in arms over the plan (see 
New York State has become outright hostile to any business remotely connected to fossil fuels. NY is prejudiced and discriminates against oil and natural gas. The latest example is a “bitcoin miner” that uses natural gas to produce electricity to power some serious computers. Even though the company is doing its best to atone for its “sin” of using natural gas via buying indulgences (aka carbon offsets), environmentalist wackos still oppose the facility located in Dresden, near beautiful Seneca Lake (one of New York’s Finger Lakes) in the central part of the state.