EQT Wins Court Case Against PA DEP re $4.5M Wastewater Leak Fine
In October 2014 the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) fined PA driller EQT $4.53 million for a leaky wastewater impoundment in Tioga County, PA (see PA DEP Levies Biggest Fine Ever, $4.5M Against EQT). While EQT did not say there wasn’t a problem with leaks at the site, they did say the way the DEP calculated the fine is unreasonable and arbitrary. In fact, EQT says the DEP levied the fine and took EQT to court because a few weeks prior EQT had sued the DEP over a different matter. EQT appealed the fine and the case to PA Supreme Court and a year later the high court handed EQT a “procedural victory” by saying EQT has a point about the manner in which the DEP is calculating the fine (see PA Supreme Court Gives EQT “Procedural Victory” in $4.5M Fine Case). The Supreme Court sent the case back to a lower court, PA Commonwealth Court, for follow up work. The work is done and EQT has won. A three-judge panel ruled that the method the DEP currently uses to assess fines–by how many days pollution lingers, instead of by how many days the initial release of pollution lasted–is not legal nor common sense. The judges said such a method in fining, “would result in potentially limitless continuing violations.” Under the old way of calculating fines, the DEP was considering upping the fine on EQT to an insane $157 million. Calculating it under the new way will mean a fine of around $120,000. This is a major victory for EQT and a reigning in of egregiously overzealous state regulators…
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A West Virginia law professor and one of his students (who went on to become a trial attorney with the U.S. Dept. of Justice), have just published a research paper on the topic of surface and mineral rights in the Mountain State. The paper, titled “Horizontal Drilling Vertical Problems: Property Law Challenges from the Marcellus Shale Boom” (full copy below) discusses property law challenges that can impede business development and negatively impact landowners and mineral owners in shale regions, with a focus on the West Virginia Marcellus. The paper explains the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing process. A widespread problem in WV is that (because of coal) in many cases the owners of the mineral rights under the ground are not the same people who own the property on the surface. The paper makes the point that while courts can handle one-off cases, the WV legislature should develop better “large-scale policies” to deal with an ongoing, contentious situation…
January 20th, when Donald Trump is inaugurated and decomposing swamps like the EPA get drained, can’t happen soon enough. However, before that date, the Obamadroids are doing everything they can to get their last digs in. One of them is the rogue, out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency, which will soon be swept clean by Scott Pruitt (delicious justice if ever there were some). We’ve written about the sleazy practice of “sue and settle” in the past–a practice whereby government agencies like the EPA get their friends in the radical environmental movement to sue them, then they quickly settle the case and say “See, we HAVE to do this because the court is making us do it.” Scott Pruitt knows all about that practice and it will stop on Jan. 20. But until then, the EPA continues to engage in it. The latest case they’ve just settled was brought by the odious National Resources Defense Council, Earthworks and a mishmash of other radical groups in May 2016 regarding an attempt to ban injection wells and stop landfills from accepting drill cuttings (see 
In January 2015 a gang of nine far-left anti-drilling “environmental” organizations sued the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claiming the agency doesn’t require the oil and gas industry to spend big bucks to fill out reams of paperwork to prove it’s not polluting Precious Mother Earth with nasty chemicals (see 
Last May MDN told you about a group of brave landowners in Wayne County, PA who have had their property rights stolen by the Delaware River Basin Commission (see 
American Water Management Services (AWMS) owns a wastewater injection well in Trumbull County that supposedly caused a low-level earthquake (that nobody could feel) in 2014. Two wells located at the site, both operated by AWMS, were “temporarily” shut down by the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources following the quake (see 
In 2014 we brought you the interesting story of strippers in the Marcellus–stripper wells, that is (see 
In August 2015, MDN told you about a lawsuit brought by a group of left coast radicalized children who want to force the federal government to become communist and “force action” on mythical climate change (see 
In December MDN told you that anti-fossil fuelers who oppose Sunoco Logistics Partners’ Mariner East 2 Pipeline were making a last, desperate attempt to stop the project by appealing an eminent domain case to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court (see 
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…
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 