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6th Circuit Rules Sabre Energy Can’t Get Royalties from Deeper Wells
Here’s a court case that flew under the radar until now. It’s a case that has the potential to affect some drillers and some royalty owners in Ohio. Sabre Energy Corporation (the plaintiff) sued Gulfport Energy Corporation and Antero Resources Corporation (the defendants) for breach of contract. Sabre Energy owns Overriding Royalty Interests (ORRIs), or fractional shares, in defendants’ shares of royalties from their oil and gas leases. Sabre Energy contends that these ORRIs attach to defendants’ recently drilled deep horizontal wells, and so the defendants owe it royalties.
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In April, the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission upheld a regulatory order from the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) suspending operations of three wastewater injection wells located in Torch (Athens County), OH, owned by K&H Partners, a subsidiary of Tallgrass Energy (see 
In June 2018, MDN exclusively brought our readers the news that Diversified Gas & Oil (now called Diversified Energy) had purchased EQT Corporation’s Huron Shale assets, with a bunch of conventional wells, in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia for $575 million (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 
One thing we admire about the left is that they never give up. Yes, they cheat. Yes, they lie. Yes, they use foreign money. But the environmental left never, ever, gives up. An example: The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) has filed an amicus (“friend of the court”) brief asking the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to reverse a Commonwealth Court decision that led to its voiding the state’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). RGGI is an obscene carbon tax that will (a) raise the price of electricity for residents in PA and neighboring states that use PA’s electricity and (b) stop any new natural gas-fired power plants from being built in the state. In time, RGGI will also kill off existing PA gas-fired power plants. That’s precisely what the left wants to see happen, and it is using its resources (money and lawyers) to try and make it happen.
This is so frustrating. A panel of three extremely liberal (wildly left) Democrat judges sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals — two appointed by Joementia and the other appointed by Lord Obama — have overturned a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approval of the $1 billion Transco Regional Energy Access Expansion (REAE) project that is already up and running and delivering extra natural gas supplies to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland. The three-judge panel ruled that FERC didn’t seriously consider man-made global warming when approving the project. The frustrating thing is that FERC is NOT an environmental agency; it’s an economic agency. Look it up — it’s in the FERC charter. Yet the libs are now demanding FERC become something it is not, an environmental agency that considers mythical global warming before it can approve new pipeline projects. Mission accomplished for the Bidenistas and Obamadroids. No doubt the Cackleistas would also approve of this bastardization of FERC.
Last week, MDN exclusively brought you the news that the CEO of American Environmental Services, which owns Austin Master Services (AMS), had filed a brief with Belmont County Court to either forgive or reduce a $1.2 million bond needed to keep the CEO, Brad Domitrovitsch, out of jail (see 
This is a case of everybody pointing at somebody else. Natural gas with contaminants (dirty gas) flowed through pipelines to Fairmont State University (in Marion County, WV), which “significantly damaged boilers, gas lines, valved and regulators and other structures and equipment on the college campus” in September 2021. The university sued the local utility company providing the gas, Hope Gas. In return, Hope said that *if* the gas was not clean, it was not their fault. They got the gas from Eastern Gas Transmission and Storage (EGTS), formerly owned by Dominion Energy but now owned by Berkshire Hathaway Energy.
Yesterday, the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) opened up the shuttered Austin Master Services (AMS) radiological waste management solutions company in Martins Ferry (Belmont County), Ohio, to begin cleanup work at the facility. One contractor began working at the site, while a bunch of others did a “pre-bid walkthrough” to look at what is there to make bids for cleaning it. AMS is permitted by the ODNR to temporarily store up to 600 tons of fracking waste, like drill cuttings and wastewater. ODNR estimates there are some 10,000 tons of fracking waste at the site. AMS ran out of money, and vendors quit accepting the waste. After failing to meet a court-ordered July 22 deadline, ODNR stepped in to handle the cleanup.
As we have been reporting, Austin Master Services, a radiological waste management solutions company in Martins Ferry (Belmont County), Ohio, that handles fracking waste (trucks it for disposal), ran into trouble when it ran out of money. The facility where waste is temporarily stored went from a permitted maximum of 600 tons of stored waste to over 10,000 tons, in violation of its permit. The Ohio Attorney General’s office filed a lawsuit against the company to force compliance. As is always the case, there are two sides to every story. The side of AMS and its owner, Brad Domitrovitsch, is not getting much media coverage. We have an update on Brad’s side of the story…
In November 2022, all five members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), including three Democrats, voted to approve an order allowing the proposed Commonwealth LNG export plant on the Calcasieu River in the Gulf of Mexico near Cameron, Louisiana to get built (see 
According to Public News Service (PNS), a Big Green propaganda outfit funded (in part) by the Fresh Water Accountability Project, the CEO of Austin Master Services (AMS), a frack waste storage facility in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, was supposed to attend a Belmont County court hearing by phone. He faces contempt-of-court charges for failing to clean up 10,000 tons of waste. However, it wasn’t the hearing that caught our attention; it was a comment made by the Mayor of Martins Ferry.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan used a considerable amount of fossil energy and emitted tons of carbon dioxide to jet over to Dubai last December to participate in the COP28 confab, where he released a final rule that was “two years in the making” to force the U.S. oil and gas industry to cut methane emissions by using budget-busting new technologies and onerous (frequent) inspections (see 
As we mentioned in a companion post today, the Williams Transco Regional Energy Access Expansion (REAE) project recently received permission from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to begin operations for another segment of the REAE project, flowing an extra 130 MMcf/d of natural gas to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland (see FERC OKs Request to Place More of Regional Energy Access Online). However, yesterday, Williams suffered a minor legal setback related to the REAE project.