Precision Drilling Settles 15-Year PPE Overtime Suit for $1.9M
How long does it take a rig hand to pull on coveralls, lace up steel-toed boots, and grab a hard hat? According to Precision Drilling’s own expert, about 2.6 to 4.1 minutes per shift. According to the workers’ lawyers, a lot longer. After 15 years, two trips to the Third Circuit and one to the U.S. Supreme Court, the two sides have split the difference, and it will cost Precision $1.9 million. On Monday (Sept. 22), both sides filed a joint brief in Williamsport federal court asking Judge Matthew Brann to approve the deal. It covers 1,006 hourly rig workers, some of whom worked Precision rigs right here in the Marcellus. The dollars are small. The legal rule the case left behind for Pennsylvania is not. Read More “Precision Drilling Settles 15-Year PPE Overtime Suit for $1.9M”
A federal judge in Pittsburgh has ruled that two EQT subsidiaries must face most of a lawsuit filed on behalf of four West Virginia kids who claim that emissions from EQT’s shale wells and a nearby compressor station made them sick. On Sept. 23, U.S. District Judge Robert Colville threw out just one of the five claims, a request for a medical monitoring trust fund, and he gave the kids’ lawyers 21 days to fix and refile it. The rest of the case moves forward. That includes a “strict liability” claim that EQT had argued West Virginia law flat-out does not allow against oil and gas operations. It’s a pleading-stage ruling, not a verdict. Even so, it’s a loss for EQT, and it’s one the whole industry should watch. 
A year and a day after the Farnsworth #4 orphan well blew out and burned six people inside Ohio’s Wayne National Forest, one of the survivors went to court. Chazz Bates — a 20-year-old rig hand at the time — filed suit Aug. 21 in Washington County Common Pleas Court against his own employer, Monroe Drilling Operations LLC, and the cementing subcontractor on the job, Zanesville-based Formation Cementing Inc. The complaint, which also names 10 unidentified “John Doe” defendants, alleges the two companies skipped basic well control before pumping cement into a well nobody had pressure-tested — and that an ODNR inspector had flagged Monroe Drilling’s homemade wellhead as leaking and inadequate two months before the explosion. 
Big Green’s second legal attack against Transco’s Southeast Supply Enhancement Project (SESE) just fired its opening shot. On September 18, Sierra Club, Appalachian Voices, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, and 7 Directions of Service filed their 142-page opening brief in the D.C. Circuit (Case No. 26-1100), arguing FERC’s approval of the pipeline was “arbitrary and capricious” because the agency allegedly ignored evidence that SESE and a second, co-located pipeline would combine to inflict “severe and potentially permanent” damage on streams across Virginia and North Carolina. Construction on SESE has continued the entire time — including through a failed bid by the same groups to freeze it back in June. 
DeepRock Disposal Solutions wants two of its Noble County, Ohio, injection wells back in service — and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) keeps saying no. ODNR’s Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management shut the Travis and Warren wells in January 2023, blaming them for a 2021 brine eruption that cost the state $1.28 million to clean up. DeepRock argued its case at a hearing in April. It lost. The division chief issued a fresh order on July 31 continuing the suspension, and on Aug. 28 DeepRock appealed to the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission. Here’s the part our readers should circle on the calendar: under Ohio Administrative Code, DeepRock has 120 days from that July 31 order — until roughly Nov. 28 (our count) — to submit a plan fixing what the division found, or plug both wells permanently. 
Big Green scored a win yesterday — but not the win they’re telling you they got. On Tuesday, September 8, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit vacated the Clean Water Act Section 401 water quality certification (WQC) that the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) issued last November for Williams/Transco’s Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) project — the $1 billion, 400,000 Dth/d expansion that carries Marcellus gas from Pennsylvania, across New Jersey, under Raritan Bay, and into New York City (see 
A federal judge in Knoxville has thrown out the environmental review behind the Tennessee Valley Authority’s $2.5 billion Kingston gas plant — and almost nobody has seen the ruling, because it’s sealed. We pulled the public docket and found the whole story hiding in TVA’s own court filings. On August 31, U.S. District Judge Curtis L. Collier granted partial summary judgment to Appalachian Voices, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Sierra Club, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center. The judge vacated TVA’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and Record of Decision (ROD) for the plant, which is replacing nine coal units at the old Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tennessee — the site of the infamous 2008 coal ash spill. 
Anti-drilling group Protect PT has opened a new front against the biggest gas-fired AI project in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. On Aug. 25, Protect PT and two Upper Burrell residents — Allen Uhler and Guy Fuller — filed a land use appeal in Westmoreland County Court challenging the township supervisors’ approval of TECfusions’ work at the former Alcoa/Arconic research campus. Notably, the appeal doesn’t attack the gas turbines or the Marcellus wells feeding them. It attacks a piece of paper. Or rather, the absence of one. 
A federal judge in Syracuse dropped a legal anvil on New York’s $75 billion climate shakedown yesterday, ruling that the state’s Climate Change Superfund Act is preempted by federal law and cannot be enforced. It’s a complete win for West Virginia AG J.B. McCuskey, the 21 other state AGs who joined him, and the industry groups that piled on. We’ve been following this one since Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the bill in the waning days of 2024 (see 
Here’s a pipeline fight where the bad guys aren’t the greens. Last Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and Enbridge subsidiary East Tennessee Natural Gas (ETNG), tossing out a challenge brought not by environmental radicals but by the pipeline’s own customers — a group of small-town gas utilities in Tennessee, Virginia, and Alabama who said they were being stuck with the bill for an upgrade they never asked for. 
A group of North Fayette Township (Allegheny County, PA) residents who tried to block a Range Resources well pad has lost its appeal — not because a court weighed their evidence, but because they live too far away to sue. The Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court ruled August 25 that Stephen Bates and Heather Forster, who share an address more than two miles from the proposed pad, lack “standing” — the legal right to bring a case — to challenge the township’s approval in court. 
South Carolina’s utility regulators voted unanimously yesterday to let a $2.8 billion artificial intelligence data center in Spartanburg County build and run its own 457-megawatt natural gas power plant without asking the state’s permission first. The decision is a big win for the “behind-the-meter” model — where a data center brings its own generation instead of leaning on the grid — and it’s a model that is going to burn a lot of molecules. Possibly some of ours.