Lawsuit Against WV’s 2022 Forced Pooling Law Still Alive, for Now
Hopefully, we’re near the end of an effort to overturn a bill passed in early 2022 by the West Virginia legislature, Senate Bill (SB) 694, which finally brought forced pooling for shale wells to the Mountain State after eight years of trying (see WV House Passes Forced Pooling Bill, Done Deal When Gov Signs). A lawsuit brought by two West Virginia landowners seeking to overturn the state’s forced pooling (i.e., unitization) law was put on pause by a federal judge in December 2022 (see WV Landowner Lawsuit to Block Forced Pooling Law Dealt Another Blow). The federal judge said the lawsuit belongs in state court and that he did not have jurisdiction over the case. West Virginia officials disagreed and appealed the ruling to the next rung up the federal court ladder (see WV Appeals Lawsuit re Forced Pooling Law to Higher Fed Court). It took a while, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled two days ago that the federal district court judge didn’t do his job right (he DOES have jurisdiction) and bounced the matter back to him for resolution.
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Score a (very) minor victory for the radicals of a Little Green Group (funded with money from Big Green groups) called Protect PT. Last October, a lawsuit brought by Protect PT against a second injection well planned for Plum Borough (Allegheny County), PA, had oral arguments before the state’s Commonwealth Court (see 
Last Friday, Joementia announced he is putting “a temporary pause on pending decisions of Liquefied Natural Gas exports.” The reason? The so-called “climate crisis” is “the existential threat of our time.” It’s all rubbish. The real reason is that he bowed to radical leftists in his own party. He needs them if he has a prayer of a chance of winning reelection in November (God forbid). The action supposedly affects 17 projects in the pipeline that have requested approval from the Dept. of Energy to export LNG to countries without free-trade agreements. But now, antis say Biden’s pause can potentially help them with their existing lawsuits against facilities already approved by the DOE.
The province of Quebec, Canada, with a huge supply of Utica Shale gas sitting beneath it, passed a new law in April 2022 — Bill 21 — outlawing all oil and natural gas production throughout the province (see 
Anti-fossil fuel fanatics in Ohio (and beyond) still can’t accept that they lost a battle to block drilling under (not on) Ohio state-owned land, including some Ohio state parks. In November, the Ohio Oil & Gas Land Management Commission (OGLMC) met in a public forum and voted to allow shale drilling under three state-owned tracts of land: (1) all 20,000 acres of Salt Fork State Park in Guernsey County, (2) more than 300 acres of Valley Run Wildlife Area in Carroll County, and (3) 66 acres of the Zepernick Wildlife Area in Columbiana County (see 
Here’s a story we haven’t written about in over three years. 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. Actually, there are two injection wells located at the site, both operated by AWMS. They were both “temporarily” shut down by the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources following the quake nobody could feel (see 
Antero Resources is one of the largest drillers in the Marcellus/Utica (with major assets in West Virginia). As good and careful as companies like Antero are when hiring, sometimes there’s a rotten apple found in the barrel. Such was the case with a former employee who headed up the company’s operations in WV — where most of its drilling happens. The former employee took bribes and kickbacks from a vendor over a period of years (2012-2015), steering contracts to that vendor. The vendor’s performance was not as good as other competitors. At the end of years of litigation, Antero was finally awarded compensation from a jury, and a bit extra from a judge, to make up for the actions of their rogue employee (see 
For years, anti-fossil fuel haters have made the same false claims: Drilling and fracking will destroy the environment, contaminate your water, make you sick, and create death and destruction everywhere it’s tried. Then, a responsible driller, like Olympus Energy, comes along and drills wells not far from the lefties in Pittsburgh, and none of those things happen. The air is fine, the water is fine, and nothing gets polluted or contaminated. In other words, the left’s wild claims are exposed as outright lies. But that doesn’t stop the left, funded by shadowy sources, from continuing to sue and challenge time and again — even AFTER shale wells are already drilled and online!
In October 2020, a law firm filed a lawsuit on behalf of several Cabot Oil & Gas shareholders against Cabot (now Coterra Energy), claiming the company “had inadequate environmental controls and procedures and/or failed to properly mitigate known issues related to those controls and procedures,” and that the company “failed to fix faulty gas wells which polluted Pennsylvania’s water supplies through stray gas migration,” and that the company, in general, hid all of this from the public — namely from investors (see 
Hope Gas is a Local Distribution Company (LDC) that provides gas service to approximately 125,000 residential, industrial, and commercial customers in thirty-five West Virginia counties. The company owns and maintains more than 6,900 miles of pipelines that safely deliver West Virginia natural gas to many homes and commercial or industrial sites. In September, Hope Gas asked the WV Public Service Commission (PSC) of West Virginia for permission to build a new 30-mile pipeline in Monongalia County (see 
In May, the PHMSA issued a proposed new rule that would slap onerous and very expensive new requirements on pretty much all natural gas pipelines in the country, including 2.7 million miles of gas transmission, distribution, and gathering pipelines; 400+ underground natural gas storage facilities; and 165 liquefied natural gas facilities (see 
A small group of uppity Virginia landowners don’t want Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) crossing their horse pastures, leaving a mark. So they conspired with Big Green lawyers in a lawsuit challenging the right of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to use eminent domain to build pipelines across private land. In October, the landowners filed an “emergency” request with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the court to block MVP construction while the eminent domain lawsuit grinds on. The D.C. Circuit judges rejected that request in October (see