WV Supreme Court Rules EQT Can’t Deduct P-P Costs from Royalties
A significant court case was decided last week in West Virginia. The WV Supreme Court ruled in a gas royalty case that not only has significant implications for WV landowners (and drillers), but also may reverberate across the border into neighboring Pennsylvania where the same issue has been a long and contentious fight–what we call a civil war between landowners and drillers. Like all such cases, this one is complicated and not easy to summarize, but we’ll do our best. The WV Supremes have just handed down a decision that says, in essence, that EQT (and by extension other drillers) cannot deduct post-production expenses when calculating royalty payments to landowners. Specifically, the justices in their ruling said that drillers can “not deduct from that (royalty) amount any expenses that have been incurred in gathering, transporting or treating the oil or gas after it has been initially extracted, any sums attributable to a loss or beneficial use of volume beyond that initially measured or any other costs that may be characterized as post-production.” Yikes! That is fantastic news for landowners who now have a case to recoup money deducted from their checks–and really bad news for drillers who will owe that money. The big winners are, of course, the lawyers who will litigate this for years to come. However, hold on to those briefs–EQT has just appealed the decision, asking the WV Supreme Court to reconsider their decision, gently chiding the court for erring in their interpretation of state law on royalties…
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You may recall our story about the daughter of a Huntingdon County, PA landowner, radicalized by Big Green groups (as evidenced by her association with well known protesters previously arrested), who took to a tree on her mom’s property in order to illegally stop crews working on tree clearing for the Mariner East 2 pipeline (see 
On Oct. 8, after five years in the making, Pennsylvania adopted new shale drilling regulations (see 
Stone Energy, an independent oil and natural gas exploration and production company (E&P) headquartered in Lafayette, Louisiana drills mainly in the Gulf of Mexico but also has (or rather had) a presence in the Marcellus/Utica Shale with 90,000 acres of leases. In October Stone announced (a) it is selling its Marcellus/Utica assets to Tug Hill for $350 million, and (b) the company is preparing to file for bankruptcy (see 
One of the many companies in the Marcellus industry targeted by Pennsylvania’s former Attorney General, Kathleen Kane, for extinction was Minuteman Environmental Services, a PA company that served the shale industry with several different businesses (see 
For some time we’ve followed the story of Range Resources and their (former) wastewater impoundments in Washington County, PA. The PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) fined Range a whopping $4.15 million for violations in September 2014 (see 
Statoil, based in Norway, is a big player in the West Virginia Marcellus Shale. Statoil paid property taxes to Brooke, Marshall, Ohio and Wetzel counties (all in WV) in 2015 and later found, during an audit/review, that they had overpaid those counties. They overpaid Brooke by $1.8 million, Ohio by $2.9 million, Wetzel by $1.6 million and Marshall by $342,000. The WV Tax Department argues that Statoil “acted negligently” and exercised “poor judgment” in not finding the mistake sooner. All four counties voted to deny Statoil’s request, so Statoil took them to court, asking the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals to hear the case. However, the Appeals court has just ruled that the cases are not “complex” and don’t require “special treatment,” so back to county court the cases will go…
For several years MDN has tracked and reported on a lawsuit brought against the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District (MWCD) by an anti-drilling couple in Guernsey County, OH–Leatra Harper and her husband Steven Janstro (backed by the odious Food & Water Watch). At last check in April 2014, the couple had won the right to continue on with the lawsuit (see 
Kinder Morgan’s Broad Run Expansion Project will expand transportation capacity of natural gas on the existing Tennessee Gas Pipeline system. The project includes the construction of two new compressor stations in Kanawha County, WV, one new compressor station in Davidson County, TN, and one new compressor station in Madison County, KY. Tennessee Gas also expects to increase compression capacity by modifying two of its existing compressor stations in Powell and Boyd counties in KY by replacing existing capacity with new, higher-rated horsepower compression units. The project will provide an extra 200,000 dekatherms per day (Dth/d) of transportation capacity along the same capacity path as the Broad Run Flexibility project, which was placed in service on Nov. 1, 2015. All of the additional gas will come from Antero Resources and their Marcellus/Utica program. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a Certificate to build the project in September. However, several anti-drillers filed an appeal, asking for a stay claiming a removal of 40 acres of forest for a compressor station would irreparably harm Mom Earth. FERC has just ruled against the stay and told the antis Mom Earth will be just fine. Fire up the backhoes!…
Sunoco Logistics Partners, the builder of the Mariner pipeline projects, has fought a long and hard legal battle to be recognized as a public utility in Pennsylvania–especially with regard to the next big project in the lineup, the Mariner East 2 pipeline. ME2, as it’s called, is a $2.5 billion, 350-mile natural gas liquids (NGL) pipeline that will run from eastern Ohio through the state of Pennsylvania to the Marcus Hook refinery near Philadelphia. From the beginning anti-pipeline fanatics have tried to derail the project by claiming it is not a public utility (with the right of eminent domain) as defined by PA’s statutes. In July 2014 two administrative law judges working for the PA Public Utility Commission (PUC) said ME2 is not a public utility (see 
The radicals at the Sierra Club are at it again. Causing private companies to expend big money to defend their Constitutional, capitalistic rights. The NEXUS Pipeline is a $2 billion, 255-mile interstate pipeline that will run from Ohio through Michigan and eventually to the Dawn Hub in Ontario, Canada. It is a critically needed pipeline to move Utica and Marcellus Shale gas from an over-saturated market in the northeast to markets in the Midwest and Canada. The Sierra Club has just sued DTE Energy, one of the sponsors of the project, falsely claiming DTE’s electric customers will end up paying more for electricity because of the pipeline…
It’s about time! A U.S. District Court Judge in Texas recently granted Exxon the right to examine “internal phone records, other communications and depositions” of far-left Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, related to her involvement in attempting to persecute Exxon Mobil for daring to say man-made global warming may not be all it’s cracked up to be (see 
Yesterday MDN told you that a war of words has broken out between the Obama U.S. Army Corps of Politicized Engineers and Energy Transfer Equity (ETE) over the Dakota Access Pipeline (see 
