Anti-Drilling/Fossil Fuel | Energy Companies | Industrywide Issues | Litigation | Olympus/Huntley & Huntley | Pennsylvania | Westmoreland County
Big Green Challenges SWPA Fracking in Supreme Court This Week
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.
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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 
The American Energy Alliance (AEA) is raising the alarm of a conspiracy by Democrat Attorneys General from deep blue states colluding with Big Green groups to bypass Congress with a new round of sue-and-settle lawsuits. It is the equivalent of an overthrow of the legislative branch of the federal government. Here’s how the conspiracy works…
In what can only be characterized as a complete and utter failure of a Big Green lawsuit, yesterday a Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) judge ordered Sunoco Logistics, builder of the Mariner East pipeline system, to pay a $2,000 fine (the equivalent of a few high-priced lunches) and talk more to local groups around Philadelphia that want to complain about the project. That’s the end result of a request by seven antis that began in November 2018 asking the PUC to shut down the entire three-pipeline project (see 
Last week MDN told you that Epsilon Energy, which concentrates most of its effort on the Marcellus in Susquehanna County, PA, had sued its joint venture partner Chesapeake Energy over Chessy’s refusal to allow Epsilon to drill four shale wells on land Chessy doesn’t want to drill (see 
Last week the State of New Jersey, along with co-conspirator the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, filed their responses to defend their indefensible actions in blocking PennEast Pipeline’s eminent domain taking of land owned or controlled by NJ. It was their last, desperate attempt to avoid having a lower court ruling overturned. They gave it their best shot, but we think they came up short.
Epsilon Energy concentrates most of its effort on the Marcellus in Susquehanna County, PA. Epsilon doesn’t typically do its own drilling. The company joint venture partners with (gives money to) other companies, like Chesapeake Energy, and the other company typically does the drilling. Epsilon, according to its website, owns ~4,000 net acres in the PA Marcellus. Epsilon sued Chesapeake Energy earlier this month over lack of access to drill wells on acreage Chesapeake says it doesn’t want to drill. A Texas bankruptcy court judge has tossed Epsilon’s lawsuit. Looks like bankruptcy is a “get out of your contracts for free” card for Chesapeake.