Industrywide Issues

Accidents | Energy Companies | EQT Corp | Greene County (PA) | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania

Diesel Fuel Spill at Drilling Site in Green County, PA
March 7, 2012March 7, 2012

Last December, about 480 gallons of diesel fuel leaked onto the ground at a well site in Patterson Run (Greene County), PA. EQT, the driller at the site, notified the state DEP and the National Response Center. The spill was quickly cleaned up, within 24 hours, and there were no environmental impacts following the spill. However, local officials are only just now learning about the spill, and that makes them upset.

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Bedford County | Blair County | Cambria County | Economic Impact | Fulton County | Huntingdon County (PA) | Industrywide Issues | Jobs | Pennsylvania | Somerset County

PA Counties Band Together for Grant to Create Marcellus Jobs
March 7, 2012March 7, 2012

A regional economic development group made up of officials from Blair, Cambria, Somerset, Huntingdon, Fulton and Bedford counties in Pennsylvania is asking the state for a $700,000 grant to help them help businesses located in the southern Allegheny region identify new business opportunities in the shale gas drilling industry. The group hopes that their geography, strategically located between PA’s northeastern and southwestern Marcellus gas fields, will bring new business to the area, and along with that new business, more jobs.

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Industrywide Issues | Litigation | Pennsylvania | Statewide PA

Jarrett Out, Jugovic In as President & CEO of PennFuture
March 6, 2012March 6, 2012

Stop the presses. Jan Jarrett, long-time President and CEO of PennFuture, has resigned her position. PennFuture is Pennsylvania’s largest environmental lobbying organization, and also a largely anti-drilling organization. Her departure is sudden and unexpected after leading the organization for the past 13 years.

Why the sudden departure? Jeanne Clarke, spokesperson for PennFuture says that Jarrett plans to take a “breather” and focus on her grandchildren. However, her departure may be related to trouble that cropped up last December over how a state grant was spent by the organization:

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Hydraulic Fracturing | Industrywide Issues | New York | Regulation | Statewide NY

MDN Editor Jim Willis Interviews NY Sen. Tom Libous
March 6, 2012March 6, 2012

MDN editor Jim Willis interviewed NY State Senator Tom Libous last Friday, March 2nd. Sen. Libous is a member of Gov. Cuomo’s Hydraulic Fracturing Advisory Panel and an influential member of the NY Senate, holding the post of Deputy Majority Leader. We spoke about his recent remarks in the New York Times and whether or not his support for drilling has changed. We also spoke about the Advisory Panel’s work and where things go from here. It’s a short and informative interview, especially for New York’s landowners who are wondering whether, and when, drilling might begin in New York.

Jim interviewed Sen. Libous as special correspondent for Energy in Depth, so head on over to this page on the EID-M website and click to listen.
Industrywide Issues | Lackawanna County | Landfills | Pennsylvania

Scranton Landfill Request for More Shale Cuttings Approved
March 6, 2012March 6, 2012

Exactly one month ago MDN reported that Keystone Sanitary Landfill, a privately owned and operated municipal solid waste landfill located in Dunmore, PA (a Scranton suburb), had applied to increase the daily volume of shale cuttings (leftover rock waste from drilling) from 600 to 1,000 tons per day. They also requested from the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) a change so they could receive the cuttings in an “unprocessed or unsolidified form” (see this MDN story).

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Hydraulic Fracturing | Industrywide Issues | Litigation | Pennsylvania | Regulation | Washington County

PA Towns Banding Together to Sue State Over New Drilling Law
March 6, 2012March 6, 2012

Last month’s passage of new Marcellus drilling regulations in Pennsylvania has some local municipalities grumbling that the state’s “Act 13” regulating oil and gas drilling and superseding local zoning ordinances takes away their ability to, yes, control drilling in their local municipalities. Which of course is what the law is designed to do!

Several municipalities, Cecil Township the latest, are making moves to band together and sue the state over the new law in an effort to overturn the Act 13 provision.

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Allegheny County | Butler County | Industrywide Issues | Jobs | Pennsylvania | Washington County

Dry Gas Drilling Slowdown Results in Layoffs in PA
March 6, 2012March 6, 2012

Although historically low natural gas prices are great for consumers, it’s not so great for some in the shale gas drilling industry. Because drillers are changing their focus away from drilling in the “dry gas” areas of the Marcellus Shale play and instead focusing on the “wet gas”—or liquids-rich—portion of the play, it causes a slow down for some businesses and leads to layoffs in certain industries, like title searching. Title searches of property deeds are a necessary part of acquiring leases for drilling.

A title search company in western PA has just laid off nearly half of their staff:

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Industrywide Issues | Ohio | Statewide OH | Taxation | Utica Shale

OH Gov. Kasich to Introduce New Tax on Shale Gas Drilling
March 5, 2012March 5, 2012

This one is sure to disappoint landowners. In an Obamaesque move, conservative Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich is set to propose a new tax on Utica and Marcellus shale gas drilling in order to reduce Ohio state income taxes.

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Hydraulic Fracturing | Industrywide Issues | New York | Regulation | Statewide NY

NY Gov. Cuomo Signals Fracking Issue is “How” and Not “If”
March 5, 2012March 5, 2012

Finally some good news for New York landowners who want shale gas drilling to go forward in the state. Lately, it’s seemed as if New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was backing off his support for shale gas drilling. He elected to not even mention it in this year’s State of the State address, even though there was a section about it in his prepared remarks (see this MDN story). Then he made a comment about the status of the review process and making on determination on whether drilling will even be allowed (see this MDN story). And then a comment to a Syracuse newspaper editorial board about a decision coming “in a few months” on fracking (see this MDN story), the implied meaning was whether or not it would be allowed at all.

Add it all up and it certainly appeared that Gov. Cuomo was stepping back from his earlier support of drilling. But Andrew Cuomo is the consummate politician and perhaps that was all smokescreen. Last Friday, in a radio interview, he all but said fracking will go forward in the state, it’s just a matter of how and when it will happen, not if.

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Accidents | Hydraulic Fracturing | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Susquehanna County

AP’s Newest Non-Story About Dimock, PA
March 5, 2012March 5, 2012

From time to time, the Associated Press will write a story about the gas drilling issue. Because a huge number of newspapers in the U.S. subscribe to the AP service, they run the story and overnight a single story, or various versions of the story, is run in hundreds of newspapers nationwide creating an echo chamber making it seem as if it’s new news. It’s happened again with another non-story about Dimock, PA. By now most MDN readers will know what Dimock is about—an attempt to create a link between hydraulic fracturing and chemical contamination of a water aquifer. If you need a background on the controversy, click here for MDN’s stories on Dimock.

The latest non-story story from the AP is an announcement that the EPA, that has been conducting water testing in the Dimock area, will release its first test results this week. That’s the sum total of the news in the story. But the AP story includes lots of background and fluff. One of the interesting backgrounder interviews is with a geologist from northeastern PA near Dimock:

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Chesapeake Energy | Economic Impact | Energy Companies | Hydraulic Fracturing | Industrywide Issues

Rolling Stone Shale Gas Hit Piece, Chesapeake Responds
March 5, 2012March 5, 2012

Last week Rolling Stone magazine ran a hit piece on the natural gas industry in general, and Chesapeake Energy and its CEO Aubrey McClendon in particular. The article, titled “The Big Fracking Bubble: The Scam Behind the Gas Boom” tries to recycle the theme already postulated by Ian Urbina in the New York Times some months ago that energy companies are vastly overstating just how much gas there is, and that they are in essence perpetrating a fraud on investors by covering it up. Rolling Stone, the NYT and other anti-drilling “media” outlets (I’d call them propaganda outlets) all use the same language and same arguments, trying to drive into readers’ psyche that shale gas drilling is a “Ponzi scheme” hoping to connect Bernie Madoff with gas drilling in your mind. Nice try Rolling Stone.

On Saturday, Chesapeake issued the following response, exposing the fallacies and lies found in the Rolling Stone article:

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Hydraulic Fracturing | Industrywide Issues | New York | Regulation | Statewide NY | Tompkins County

NY Towns Ban All Drilling, Not Just Horizontal Fracking
March 2, 2012March 2, 2012

Residents who live in New York townships that can’t seem to wait to ban drilling should be aware of something. These bans are bans of all gas drilling, not just horizontal hydraulic fracturing. That’s what residents in Enfield (Tompkins County), NY found out on Wednesday at a meeting with the town attorney. The Enfield town board plans to vote to enact a one-year moratorium in late April or early May, and the moratorium is on vertical as well as horizontal gas well drilling.

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Hydraulic Fracturing | Industrywide Issues | Public Opinion

Josh Fox Bullies Filmmaker, Decides to Make Own Documentary
March 2, 2012March 2, 2012

Move over Josh Fox and Gasland. There’s a new documentary on the way that will set the record straight and deliver the real truth about fracking. The new documentary is appropriately named FrackNation. Filmmaker and journalist Phelim McAleer is working on it now. In today’s New York Post, McAleer writes about how he was inspired by Josh Fox’s legal bullying into creating it:

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Hydraulic Fracturing | Industrywide Issues | Regulation

New Regulations to Control Fracking on the Way from Obama
March 2, 2012March 2, 2012

For all of President Obama’s talk about the promise of shale gas and his support of it, once again he and his administration’s actions do not match the talk. On Wednesday, Obama’s Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, told a congressional hearing that his department is going to issue new federal regulations to control hydraulic fracturing.

This is a clear violation of state’s rights to regulate oil and gas development within their own borders. But unconstitutionally ceasing power is nothing new for the Obama administration. The end result of these new regulations will be to slow down new shale drilling domestically.

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Hydraulic Fracturing | Industrywide Issues

Polish Geological Institute Study Finds Fracking is Safe
March 2, 2012March 2, 2012

Researchers from the Polish Geological Institute have just released a study of the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing. Poland has its own shale deposit, the Silurian shale, which is thought to contain the right mix of high organic content to make it productive for shale gas drilling. The Poles keep hearing from the United States how controversial fracking is, so they decided to conduct their own study. What did they find?

The study found that soil, air and water are all just fine if drilling is done according to regulations. That is, hydraulic fracturing is safe. A copy of the report summary is embedded below. This is the accompanying press release issued by the Institute:

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Energy Services | Industrywide Issues | Inergy | Lycoming County | Pennsylvania | Pipelines | Statewide PA | UGI Energy Services | WGL Holdings

New $1B Marcellus Gas Pipeline Coming from NE PA to MD
March 2, 2012March 2, 2012

Three companies are joining forces to spend $1 billion to build a new Marcellus natural gas pipeline that runs from northern Pennsylvania to Maryland. Most major pipelines head in the other direction, trying to tap into northeastern markets like New York and Boston. But Inergy, UGI and WGL, the three partners, have a different take. They want to send gas in the other direction—to the Mid-Atlantic region—and along the way service markets including Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

Dubbed the Commonwealth Pipeline, this new 200 mile, 30-inch pipeline will start in Lycoming County, PA where Inergy is currently building a gathering pipeline to connect Marcellus wells in Bradford and Sullivan counties, and from there go south through central and eastern PA, eventually connecting to WGL’s gas distribution system near Rockville, MD. The new pipeline will connect with other major pipelines along its route allowing gas to move bi-directionally.

From the Inergy press release:

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