Report: Effects of Marcellus Shale Dev on Criminal Justice System
The Center for Rural Pennsylvania (CRP), a bipartisan, bicameral legislative agency that serves as a resource for rural policy within the Pennsylvania General Assembly, continues to pump out the reports on the Marcellus Shale and its impacts on the state at a prodigious rate. They issued the third report in a series in January, another in February, and a third in March (see New Report: Housing and Marcellus Shale Development in PA). The reports each focus on a single topic and how the Marcellus Shale industry in the state is affecting (or not) that particular constituency. The newest/fourth this year (sixth in the series) study from the CRP is titled “Effects of Marcellus Shale Development on the Criminal Justice System” (full copy below). MDN friend Tom Shepstone of NaturalGasNow.org describes the report this way: “Once again, the narrative is an equivocal document apparently intended to give any reader something they’ll like. The data, however, is extensive, there is none of the unprofessional focus group commentary that has characterized some previous reports in this series and there are actual comparisons between Marcellus and non-Marcellus counties that allow for more useful analysis. What’s most interesting about the report is that it completely voids most of the fractivist junk science and junk journalism we’ve seen on the subject of shale crime.”…
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Well well. It seems by giving out the consolation prize of putting PIOGA (the Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association) and other industry reps on the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection’s newly created conventional board isn’t working out quite as well as expected for Acting DEP Sec. John Quigley (see 
Yesterday Dominion, a huge natural gas and electric utility as well as a midstream company, announced plans to build the State of Virginia’s largest natural gas powered electric generating plant–in Greensville County, VA. (By the way, Dominion won the Award for Excellence in Corporate Social Responsibility at the Northeast Oil & Gas Awards on Wednesday in Pittsburgh. Well done!) The $1 billion project will produce 1,600 megawatts of electricity using combined-cycle technology–enough electricity to power 400,000 homes. Dominion will use Marcellus Shale gas to power the plant, provided by Williams’ Transco pipeline. The plant will also be fed by a second Marcellus Shale pipeline–Dominion’s own Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a $5 billion, 550-mile pipeline slated to run from West Virginia through Virginia and into to North Carolina (see 
Sometimes the CURE is worse than the disease. Such is the case with the anti-drilling Communities United for Responsible Energy (CURE) in eastern OH. The group agitated and squawked and carried on with such histrionics that they’ve gotten the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) to order an oilfield services company to shut down a satellite location in Jefferson County, OH. The offense? Depends on who you ask. The company, Anchor Drilling Fluids, says it didn’t have a permit to store excess drilling mud–the stuff used by drillers to keep a drill bit cool and lubricated and free of bacteria. The ODNR says Anchor was recycling at that site and lacked a proper waste recycling permit. Question: If you mix drilling mud at a well site but don’t use all of it, and you then truck it back to HQ to store it for a few days or weeks before taking it somewhere else, is that “recycling”? Apparently it is for the ODNR…
Pennsylvania’s Acting Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary, John Quigley, continues to come under fire from PA Republican legislators over his (so far) less-than-transparent operation of the department–especially over firing the former Oil & Gas Technical Advisory Board members and replacing them with his own people, including so-called “non-voting” members (see 
Dominion hosted a party yesterday and anti-drillers weren’t invited. Dominion’s party sported the Japanese ambassador the U.S., Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and other dignitaries–international, state and local–to celebrate the fact that the Cove Point LNG export facility is now under construction. Japan and India have together spoken for 100% of all the natural gas that can be liquefied and pumped through the new facility once it’s built and begins operations in 2017 (see 
Two weeks ago MDN told you about two men who had been indicted by a federal grand jury on felony charges of damaging a shale well (or wells) on Chevron’s Burchianti Pad in Greene County, PA in March 2014 (see 
The Marcellus industry in Pennsylvania is none too happy with the performance thus far of Acting Secretary of the Dept. of Environmental Protection, John Quigley. As MDN has noted, Quigley first fired the members of the DEP’s Oil & Gas Technical Advisory Board (see