Virginia AG Says Localities Can “Regulate” & “Prohibit” Fracking
Apparently Virginia’s Attorney General, Mark Herring, believes every county and town in the Old Dominion is populated with oil and gas experts. How else could he issue an advisory opinion that, in his opinion, every municipality in the state has the authority to regulate and/or prohibit fracking within its jurisdiction? Every other oil and gas producing state, save a bad decision made by New York’s highest court, says oil and gas regulation is solely under the purview of the state–and for good reason. The state employs oil and gas experts who know what they’re doing–what’s safe and what isn’t. How the process works. What pollutes and what doesn’t pollute. But AG Herring has thrown that out the window in Virginia…
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Yesterday MDN alerted you to the coming buzz saw of media lies about a new study that reportedly shows three Pennsylvania water wells that may have been contaminated by nearby fracking operations (see 
New York State’s anti-drilling Dept. of Environmental Conservation Commissioner, Joe Martens, is doing his best to concoct a litigation-proof Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS). The SGEIS is the document that will find too many “troubling” aspects of fracking to allow it in New York. Except there’s potentially a loophole coming in the SGEIS, if press reports can be believed. Fracking WILL be allowed IF it uses under 300,000 gallons of “liquid”–the liquid most likely being water. (A typical well takes 5-8 million gallons of water to frack.) The NY loophole of using up to 300,000 gallons of liquid leads pro-drillers like MDN to muse: Is there an alternative liquid, other than water, that can be used to frack a well economically at under 300K gallons? What if the substance is foam and not liquid–is foam exempt from the 300K gallon cap? Or how about this: Can a driller use 299,999 gallons of water to frack a well and get enough gas out of it to break even and wait until the idiot we have in office now (Gov. Andrew Cuomo) is gone and go back later and re-frack the same well once the 300K gallon restriction is lifted? Hey, it’s fun to speculate. We’re not trying to foster false hope, but we do wonder if there’s a loophole in the SGEIS that can be exploited so landowners and drillers (the good guys) can beat extremist environmentalists like Cuomo, Martens and Yoko Ono (the bad guys)…
Three weeks ago anti-drillers in the Cleveland suburb of Broadview Heights were handed a crushing defeat in which a County Common Pleas Court judge struck down a so-called community “bill of rights”–the only “right” of which was to deny legitimate oil and gas drillers the ability to conduct business. We pointed out what sore losers anti-drillers are (see