Dela. Riverkeeper Loses Yet Another Court Case – Wanted Raw Data
Time to do a happy dance. THE Delaware Riverkeeper has lost yet another court case in their ongoing effort to make mischief with anything to do with fossil fuels. Maya van Rossum, head of the organization, uses fossil fuels every day of her life, but she hates them (a lotta angst and inner conflict, we imagine). She tried to stop Williams from clearing trees for a pipeline expansion until the clock ran out on April 1st in northeastern PA–you can’t cut from April through November because bats may roost in the trees. Of course where the tree cutting was happening is nowhere near the Delaware River Basin that the Riverkeeper organization is supposed to be minding with its non-profit status. Riverkeeper lost that court case, even though the case was filed in a liberal DC court (see Dela. Riverkeeper Loses Bid to Stop Transco Expansion in PA). Riverkeeper’s latest angle is to try and get the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection to turn over unanalyzed raw data the DEP has been collecting in a multi-year study on fracking and radiation levels. The DEP is still collecting the data, but Riverkeeper thought there might be some juicy bits they could exploit for fundraising headlines. So Riverkeeper sued under the open records law to get access. A Commonwealth Court panel of judges on Friday said “no”…
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Katie McGinty is one of the Ed Rendell retreads employed by current PA Gov. Tom Wolf. She’s one of two former DEP Secretaries (under Rendell) working for Wolf. In fact, she is Tom Wolf’s chief of staff–arguably the second-most powerful person in Harrisburg after the governor himself. We’ve previously chronicled her background and how she might influence Wolf on Marcellus drilling matters (see 
Here’s how mainstream media and “environmentalists” collude to lie to you. First, a group of virulent anti-fossil fuelers sit around a conference table at the William Penn Foundation, or Heinz Foundation, or Sierra Club, or NRDC, or take-your-pick. Maybe they all have a big confab on Martha’s Vineyard–many pinheads are better than one. They sit there in a room heated by natural gas using electricity created with natural gas (or coal), sitting on chairs made from petrochemicals, and sitting there in clothes made from petrochemicals (fossil fuels) to talk about ending fossil fuels. The environmentalists talk about which issues poll well and scare the most people with respect to fracking. Everyone decides “cancer” is a great one. Yeah, we’ll use cancer. “How do you get cancer?” asks one them at the confab. “From radiation,” comes the response from one good little LibDem. “What if we could tie cancer to fracking? Wouldn’t that be great?!” Everyone cheers. How to do it…how to do it. “I know! Radon! We’ll convince everyone that fracked gas creates clouds and plumes of suffocating radon and that radon will kill ’em by giving them cancer.” Horray! Next step: Find willing accomplices in the scientific community that can be bought off with grant money to “study” the issue and publish a pre-determined anti-fracking outcome in a peer-reviewed journal (see 
Baker Hughes, the company known for its publicly available rig count data (and it’s pink drill bits use in breast cancer awareness) yesterday published its official monthly rig count tally for March. In the public press release BH notes that (our language) rig counts have fallen off a cliff. The U.S. land-based rig count, most of which are used to drill in shale plays, sunk to 1,067, down 238 rigs from February (which is 18% in a single month), and down 683 from March 2014 (which is 39%). Not a pretty picture. MDN wondered if the same trend held for the Marcellus/Utica, so we ran the numbers for PA, OH and WV…
It’s an LNG love story. Yesterday Shell announced they are buying BG Group, the former British Gas, for $69.7 billion dollars. To put it in perspective, in 1998 Exxon bought Mobil for $80 billion, forming what is now ExxonMobil. So this is that kind of scale–really really huge. The oil and gas industry is buzzing about the deal. Is this the first of many such consolidations, given the low price of oil? Will the Shell/BG deal impact shale drilling? What does it ultimately mean? We’ll leave it to others to discuss the broader implications. What we always wonder is, how will this affect the Marcellus/Utica? We have a few thoughts. Both Shell and BG have acreage in the Marcellus/Utica. But before we get to that, the first thing to understand about the Shell/BG deal is that it’s about LNG. This merger will make Shell the largest player in the global LNG market–easily twice the size of the nearest competitor…