Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline Dismantles Old Barn in Pipeline’s Path
STOP PRESS! 1/2/18 – 2:00 pm – Below is the full, original post MDN issued two hours ago. Our reporting was based on an article in the very biased Citizens’ Voice, a daily newspaper published in Wilkes-Barre, PA by the same rabidly biased, anti-drilling owners of the Scranton Times-Tribune. We should have known–the article published by the Citizens’ Voice was egregiously WRONG. It left out important facts that completely change the story. Williams reached out to MDN to set the record straight. In a nutshell, Williams’ original route for the Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline through Luzerne County totally missed a barn on the property of Dale Wilkie. Wilkie asked Williams to reroute the pipeline across his property–through his barn! Williams obliged, offering him a generous amount for the easement PLUS Williams offered to build Wilke a brand, spanking new barn to replace the old one! Wilke got estimates to rebuild the 100-year old barn as it is, using chestnut wood, making the estimate astronomically high ($400,000). This puts the entire story in a new light. We have more below from Williams responding to the Citizens’ Voice journalistic malpractice…
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Yesterday a Pennsylvania federal judge denied a group of 600+ Marcellus Shale landowners’ request to form a class action in arbitrating a royalty case against Chesapeake Energy. Although the judge’s decision is a disappointment for landowners, his decision should come as a surprise. In April, the same judge, U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann for the Middle District of PA, telegraphed that the landowners, under the law (and under the leases they signed) did not have a right to form a class action (see 
In July, West Goshen Township, in the Philadelphia suburb of Chester County, won a temporary victory in their efforts to stop Sunoco Logistics’ Mariner East 2 (ME2) NGL pipeline in their community (see 
In 2015 MDN told you about an Allegany County, NY attorney who had filed a lawsuit against the New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) over their infamous frack ban. It was the first such lawsuit to be filed against the DEC since the frack ban was officially declared (see 
Two African-American Marcellus Shale natural gas workers in the Williamsport, PA area claim they were fired, twice, based in part on their race. The two filed a lawsuit against STI Group (a staffing agency) and Chesapeake Energy. The case was thrown out by U.S. Middle District of Pennsylvania Court, but later reinstated on appeal by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. Rather than let the case drag out endlessly, STI and Chesapeake have just settled it. The amount of money they had to pay to make it go away was not disclosed. Workers are hired and fired all the time. Ours is a boom/bust industry. Was this really a case of racism? Or just a case of boom and bust? You read the details and decide for yourself…
A Bradford County, PA judge has turned down Chesapeake Energy’s attempt to wiggle out of a royalty lawsuit on a technicality. However, the judge also punted the case to a higher court to settle what he calls “novel questions of law”–rather than spending more time and money on such issues at the county court level. This is good news for landowners in Bradford County who have been shafted by Chesapeake’s royalty scheme to shift the cost of piping and processing to landowners by using inflated values for those services. In December 2015, Pennsylvania’s felony-indicted Attorney General, Kathleen Kane (now gone), brought a lawsuit against Chesapeake Energy, Anadarko and Williams accusing them of, among other things, royalty fraud (see 
A group of landowners in Ohio calling themselves the Coalition to Reroute Nexus (CORN), whom we affectionately call CORNballs, filed a lawsuit in federal court in May against the NEXUS pipeline project (see 
A little-known (outside of northeast Pennsylvania) anti-driller, Vera Scroggins, was fined $1,000 in April 2015 in Susquehanna County court (see 
Somebody needs to sue the New York University (NYU) School of Law and 10 state Attorneys General to stop a grievous practice–a bastardization of our justice system. We are floored to learn that NYU is paying to hire attorneys to work inside the offices of the Attorneys General in 10 different states–Pennsylvania being the latest. The aim of hiring these new assistants to work alongside AGs is to launch lawsuits to “protect” the environment–i.e. sue fossil fuel companies. It is a gross perversion of our legal system meant to challenge policies the very liberal NYU doesn’t like. Our legal system is now, apparently, for sale–at least it is in PA and nine other blue Democrat-controlled states. THIS MUST STOP. NOW. Since when does private money get to buy state workers? Since when does private money with VERY long strings attached get to determine how and what state workers will work on? This is wrong in so many ways. And probably illegal, which the NYU School of Law should know. If it’s not illegal (big if), at a minimum it’s grossly unethical. Paging U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions: You need to stop this–now!…
In October the radical group Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) published a “report” that makes the preposterous claim that New England customers have overpaid utility bills by $3.6 billion due to collusion between the natural gas and electricity industries (see 
Cabot Oil & Gas is tired of being sued, and slandered, by people like Dimock resident Ray Kemble and his ambulance-chasing lawyers. So in August Cabot sued back–for $5 million (see 
Yesterday the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California (sometimes referred to as the Ninth Circus) heard arguments from the Trump Administration, representing the federal government, and from lawyers representing children they are mentally abusing and who have filed a lawsuit that aims to force the end of the use of all fossil fuels in the United States–in the name of so-called man-made global warming (see yesterday’s post for background: 
Last Thursday the the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation’s (DEC) request to block of construction of Millennium Pipeline’s Valley Lateral Project (see 
We have a couple of important signs that Dominion and Duke Energy, the main sponsors of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, are getting ready to begin building the pipeline. Atlantic Coast Pipeline is a $5 billion, 594-mile natural gas pipeline that will stretch from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina. Years after the project filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), it was finally approved by FERC in October (see