BIG Mistake: Shell Falcon Pipe Pleads Guilty to Criminal Charges
Shell’s 97-mile Falcon ethane pipeline, which feeds 100,000 barrels a day of Marcellus/Utica ethane to the mighty cracker plant in Beaver County, PA, was built and running as of January 2021, well before the cracker itself was finished (see Shell Cracker Construction “in the Home Stretch” – Ready in 2022). Ironically, more of this ethane pipeline was built in Ohio and West Virginia than in Pennsylvania. Only 45.5 miles of the system is located in PA. Yet in April, the Pennsylvania Attorney General, Michelle Henry (an anti-drilling Democrat hack about to leave office) used the testimony of two fired Shell employees to charge the long-done pipeline with crimes for how it was constructed (see PA AG Files Bogus Charges Against Long-Done Shell Falcon Pipe). Shell stupidly agreed to plead guilty to three of 13 criminal charges for violating the state Clean Streams law when building the pipeline in Allegheny, Beaver, and Washington counties. Read More “BIG Mistake: Shell Falcon Pipe Pleads Guilty to Criminal Charges”
In early 2018, the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) collected a whopping $1.7 million fine from Energy Corporation of America (ECA) for violations at 17 well sites in Cumberland, Jefferson, and Whiteley Townships in Greene County, and Goshen Township in Clearfield County (see 
In January, Joementia announced he would “pause” any approvals for new LNG export plants (currently 17 requests in the pipeline) for at least one year while his people fart around pretending to figure out how to measure global warming as a new consideration for whether or not to approve such projects (see 
Yet another out-of-state protester temporarily blocked workers’ access to one of the few Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) construction sites remaining in Montgomery County, VA, yesterday morning. She was swiftly removed and arrested. According to Virginia State Police, 25-year-old Elsa Schlensker of Cleveland, Ohio, was taken into custody “without incident” and transported to the Montgomery County Jail, where she was charged with obstructing the free passage of another.
Here’s a sad story that, as far as we can tell, is not directly connected to the Marcellus/Utica. However, it’s a cautionary tale related to the oil and gas industry in Appalachia. Mark Edward Holbrook and his son Marshall Holbrook, both from Kentucky, worked in a family-owned company called Puissant Industries. The company sources natural gas by “drilling wells” and “acquiring gas rights.” We assume, given the small nature of the company, that these are conventional (vertical-only) wells and rights. When the price of gas dropped in 2015/2016, the company and the Holbrooks hit hard times. So, the two compensated by manipulating meters on the gathering pipelines that flowed their gas, making it look as though they were selling more gas than they did. In a word, it was theft — getting paid for something they didn’t provide.
We’re just a few weeks away from the 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) going online, flowing 2 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of yummy FRACKED natural gas from the Marcellus/Utica to southern Virginia and beyond. And that fact is driving the insane, unhinged left even more insane and unhinged. Yesterday, a man (who refused to identify himself as a man) tied himself to two barrels full of concrete in the middle of the road in the Bent Mountain (Roanoke County), VA, area, blocking access to an MVP work yard. The protester was spewing anti-Israel statements (a bigot and anti-Semite), along with nonsensical statements about the oil and gas industry. Truly unhinged. State police arrived to deal with the situation.
In January 2023, Pennsylvania State Senator Scott Martin (from Lancaster, PA) hosted a reelection fundraiser at an Italian restaurant in nearby Harrisburg. A pretty swanky fundraiser, too, at $1,000 a plate. Like it or not, this is how it works in the world of politics. Martin happens to be a Republican and a supporter of fossil energy. Those two things send leftists into orbit. A small group of far-left (professional) protesters showed up at the entrance of the restaurant to make a lot of noise and to make silly asses of themselves (which they excel at doing). One of them tilted over into criminality. He obstructed the doorway to the restaurant and would not let anyone enter or leave — a fire hazard at a minimum. Justice was finally rendered on Wednesday in a Dauphin County courtroom.
We think our headline about says it all. We’ve seen this type of thing many times before — out-of-town (actually, out-of-state) “protesters” show up and disrupt legal construction activity because, well, because they’re looney tunes. They’ve drunk the global warming Kool-Aid and are convinced, against all reason and rationality, that using natural gas and oil is going to destroy Mom Earth. This time around, it was a married couple well past their prime, a couple of old hippies making silly asses of themselves. They sat inside a huge plywood structure made to look like an opposum, blocking access to a Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) construction site in Virginia for several hours.
In September, Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), which has been hassled and harassed endlessly by so-called “protesters” and foreign-backed Big Green groups, sued some 40 protesters and two Big Green groups for $4 million for their ongoing illegal activity to block the final bits of the 303-mile project (see 
Emily Satterwhite, who teaches Appalachian studies at Virginia Tech and has been engaged in illegal activities against the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) going back more than five years (