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PA Chamber Files Brief in Martian School Court Case
The Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry (PA Chamber) recently filed a brief in Commonwealth Court opposing THE Delaware Riverkeeper in a case that still has us angry and baffled. The case brought by Riverkeeper is clear across the state, hundreds of miles from the Delaware River Basin where Riverkeeper supposedly operates, and attempts to force a local municipality to adopt zoning ordinances it doesn’t want to adopt. And it involves Martians.
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In November the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed to hear a case, Briggs v. Southwestern Energy, that is hands-down the most important court case to ever happen regarding the Marcellus Shale in PA. And no, we’re not exaggerating. A blizzard of briefs by Southwestern and those supporting Southwestern were filed earlier this week.
Here’s an interesting twist on the theme of drillers shorting leaseholders out of royalty money. Usually such cases involve drillers claiming post-production deductions from landowner royalty checks. This time the landowner/rightsholder is Columbia Gas Transmission (pipeline company owned by midstream giant TransCanada), and the claim is that Southwestern Energy (driller) is not paying royalties for gas produced but not actually sold.
Equitrans’ (EQT Midstream) 300-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) is now 70% built (see 
This post is about a pipeline project we’ve written quite a bit about over the past few years–Dominion Energy’s New Market project that ever-so-modestly expands an existing pipeline in Upstate New York. But at its heart, the issue is much deeper. Anti-fossil fuel radicals are challenging this project, in court, as a way to force the government to consider man-made global warming when approving such projects.
What could have been a major threat not only to Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), but to all pipeline projects, was averted on Tuesday when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case brought by 13 landowners (backed with Big Green money) challenging the right to use eminent domain for private companies.
The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) yesterday upheld an administrative law judge’s December decision against an “emergency” request by pipeline opponents to shut down both Mariner East 1 and 2 by claiming they are unsafe and need to be stopped. Can we FINALLY put this to rest and move on? ME1 and ME2 are both now online. There’s no going back.
Did the Pennsylvania Supreme Court err in its judgment declaring so-called “stripper wells” can be taxed under the 2012 Act 13 law, slapped with an impact fee assessment, if those wells produce more than 90 thousand cubic feet per day (Mcf/d) of gas in a single month (see 
This news is a bit dated, but still interesting and is new for us: Last October a group of landowners in Tioga County, NY filed a lawsuit to force the NY Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to quit dragging its feet and set a date to consider the groups application to allow LPG (liquefied petroleum gas, i.e. propane) fracking for a shale well.
Three years ago lawsuits filed by some 200 West Virginia residents against Antero Resources were combined into a class action lawsuit (see