Fed EPA Rejects Effort to Stop Clearfield County Injection Well
It’s been ten long years since Windfall Oil and Gas first floated a plan to drill a shale wastewater injection well near Dubois, in Brady Township (Clearfield County), PA. The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a permit for the well in 2015. The PA Dept. of Environmental Protection approved the project in March 2018 (see PA DEP Approves Wastewater Injection Well in Clearfield County). Residents who live near the proposed injection well have opposed the plan from the beginning. The Clearfield County Board of Commissioners is also opposed. In December 2020 the EPA reissued their permit for the well to get built. Local antis promptly challenged the EPA’s decision. Finally, after more than a year, the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board has dismissed antis’ challenge, clearing the way for the well to FINALLY get built.
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Radical environmentalists continue to use the City of Oberlin, Ohio to try and advance their agenda of ending the use of natural gas pipelines. And Oberlin willingly lets them do it. We’re referring to the latest court filing by Oberlin (actually by Big Green lobbyists using Oberlin) contesting the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) decision to approve the NEXUS pipeline, a pipeline from the Utica Shale into Michigan that’s been flowing for years connecting to a pipeline that exports some of the gas into Canada. Oberlin says FERC’s approval of NEXUS is faulty because some gas gets exported and is not “in the public interest.”
The judge in a lawsuit initiated by Cabot Oil & Gas against a Susquehanna County, PA landowner and his lawyers has had it up to here with the ongoing stonewalling and delay tactics by the landowner’s lawyers. “Four years we’ve been spinning our wheels on this nonsense,” the judge said. “The court is extremely frustrated, to put it politely.” The judge bordered on being impolite at a hearing last Thursday…
As we reported a month ago, a group of West Virginia landowners/rights owners filed a claim against EQT alleging the company had allowed leases to lapse, then at a later date reentered their property and drilled new wells (see 
Back in March MDN told you about supposed violations by Chesapeake Energy of the federal Clean Water Act and the Pennsylvania Clean Streams Law and Dam Safety and Encroachments Act by failing to identify and protect swamps (i.e. wetlands) at a number of oil and gas well sites in Pennsylvania (see 
Louisville Gas and Electric Company (LG&E) has Kentucky state approval to build a new 12-inch, 12-mile pipeline near Louisville to supply gas to 62 homes and businesses that can’t connect to LG&E’s local natgas utility system. The local Bernheim Arboretum has resisted attempts to build across three-tenths of one percent (0.028%) of Arboretum land–along an existing cleared path where electric lines already go (see 
Ohio’s House Bill (HB) 6 law granted billions (plural) of dollars to FirstEnergy in an attempt to prop up the company’s economically failing nuclear power plants. FirstEnergy bribed state legislators to pass, and keep passed, HB 6 by paying out $61 million to a small group of insiders, including the now-former Speaker of the House (see 
The Democrats who run some of the largest cities in the United States thought it would be easy to target, attack, and bring down Big Oil the same way they did Big Tobacco a generation ago–with neverending, huge lawsuits. Big Mistake. Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a lawsuit brought by the leftist Dems from the City of Baltimore, Maryland against BP, Chevron, Shell, Exxon and other Big Oil companies, alleging the use of oil and gas is causing catastrophic, man-made global warming. Based on a technicality, the Supremes ruled 7-1 against Baltimore, rejecting the lawsuit and making it much harder for other cities to try the same sleazy tactic.
Two weeks ago we brought you the sad news that completion and startup for Equitrans’ 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) and the company’s 75-mile extension to it called MVP Southgate will now be delayed until 2022 and 2023 respectively (see 
This Wednesday the radicals of “Protect PT” (Penn Township)–a group funded with shadowy Big Green money–will try to convince the Democrats sitting on Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court to overturn legal and safe shale drilling at well pads in Penn Township (Westmoreland County, PA). Olympus Energy (formerly Huntley & Huntley) previously submitted plans to drill multiple wells on two new well pads in the township. The Zoning Hearing Board approved the plans.
Here’s an interesting lawsuit in Pennsylvania with potential ramifications for both landowners and drillers. In 2013 a landowner in Warren County, PA filed a lawsuit against Mitch-Well Energy claiming the company had abandoned its leases (and its rights) by not producing marketable quantities of natural gas from several conventional wells. The company had also not paid a required annual fee in lieu of production royalties. For 18 years! Several lower courts ruled in favor of the landowner. Last week the PA “Supreme” Court (we use that term loosely) reversed the lower court rulings and said in this case, not producing gas for 18 years and not making any payments to the landowners during that time is not (yet) enough to claim the energy company has abandoned its lease rights.
Radicalized groups including the New Jersey Sierra Club and the Pinelands Preservation Alliance tried their best to abuse the court system to overturn permits to build a 28-mile natural gas pipeline project called the Southern Reliability Link (SRL) pipeline project. They have (we’re happy to report) failed. SRL will connect to New Jersey Natural Gas’ (NJNG) distribution system serving customers in Ocean, Burlington and Monmouth counties (in NJ) to provide backup for hundreds of thousands of NJ residents who lost access to natural gas following Super Storm Sandy. The NJ Superior Court’s Appellate Division dismissed appeals by the radicals to overturn state-issued permits for the project.
Ohio’s Seventh District Court recently delivered a ruling that affects landowners/rights owners as well as drillers. In Tomechko v. Garrett (full copy below), the justices ruled that “adverse possession” of shallow gas rights expands to include deep gas rights (i.e. shale rights) in cases where shallow production “modified the subterranean structure.” According to the legal experts at Frost Brown Todd, “the Seventh District’s ruling strains credulity” and has the potential to “have unintended consequences and will almost certainly result in greater uncertainty and litigation.”
Here’s a connection we hadn’t made until we read about yesterday’s oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in PennEast Pipeline vs. New Jersey. The connection is this: The PennEast case also has huge ramifications for another currently-stalled M-U pipeline. Columbia Gas wants to build a tiny 3.37-mile, 8-inch pipeline under the Potomac River from Maryland to West Virginia. It is being blocked from doing so by the lefties in Maryland (see