PA House Member Calls Shapiro DEP “Weaponized” and a “Jobs Killer”
During a Pennsylvania House Republican Policy Committee hearing on strengthening rural communities held on Wednesday, Rep. Bud Cook (R-Waynesburg) didn’t hold back when assigning blame for why the state’s rural communities are losing population and experiencing economic growth. Cook said, “The overriding impediment is Governor Shapiro’s DEP,” referring to the Dept. of Environmental Protection. One of Cook’s chief complaints is how long it takes to get a simple permit issued from the DEP.
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Here we go again with false allegations that drill cuttings from shale drillers are “radioactive.” In 2020, Tri-County Landfill Inc. submitted a permit application for the construction and operation of a municipal waste landfill in Liberty and Pine Townships, in Mercer County, PA. Judging by the reaction, the landfill will accept drill cuttings from Marcellus drillers. Tri-County previously operated a landfill at that location between 1950 and 1990 (pre-shale era). The landfill has been inactive since 1990. The PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued a permit for the landfill to reopen in December 2020. The matter has been tied up with appeals since that time and has not yet reopened. The big, bad bogeyman being used to scare nearby residents is radioactivity.
According to Reuters, the amount of natural gas flowing to U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) export plants (called feedgas) dropped to a one-year low this week as an Arctic freeze caused some energy firms to divert fuel to the domestic market, and as Freeport LNG’s facility in Texas experienced mechanical problems. Yep, another outage at Freeport. Surprised?
BMI, a Fitch Solutions company, recently provided a price forecast for the Henry Hub gas price all the way out to 2028. BMI’s forecast is much rosier than others we’ve read. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently predicted the Henry Hub price will average under $3/MMBtu in both 2024 and 2025. BMI, on the other hand, predicts the HH to hit an average of $3.40/MMBtu this year and $3.60 next year. Their lips to God’s ears!
Here’s a story we became aware of several weeks ago but have not shared until now because we could not (still cannot) confirm some of the details. A tractor trailer hauling compressed natural gas (CNG) “from Pennsylvania” crashed into a low bridge in Glenville (Schenectady County), NY, near Albany, on Thursday, Dec. 21. The driver said he did not see the height warning signs and the top of the trailer hit a railroad bridge, exploding. The resulting fireball was some 200 feet high. The driver was seriously injured with third-degree burns and airlifted to Westchester Medical Center for treatment.
PJM is the largest electric grid operator in the U.S. It serves 65 million people in 13 states plus the District of Columbia (including PA, OH, and WV). PJM came under withering criticism for an almost blackout during the cold Christmas snap of December 2022. If not for certain gas-fired peaker plants, like that in the Little Town of Bethlehem, the lights would have gone out during that brutal cold snap (see 
The American Energy Alliance and the Committee to Unleash Prosperity recently sponsored a survey of 1,600 likely voters equally divided among eight “battleground” states (Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio) conducted by MWR Strategies in December 2023. The total sample margin of error is 2.45%. The survey results confirm that there has been little change in sentiment and attitudes on energy and climate change. Many of the responses in the survey are either consistent with or more emphatic than what they found in previous surveys.
Well, that didn’t take long. Yesterday we told you about the huge jump in the price of natural gas, both the futures price and the spot (physically traded) price, due to the brutal cold snap much of the country is currently experiencing (see 
In November 2022, one of the ten natural gas storage wells at the Equitrans Rager Mountain Gas Storage Area in Jackson Township, Cambria County (in Pennsylvania), began to leak. Equitrans is the owner/operator of Rager Mountain. The well leaked roughly 100 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of gas into the atmosphere (see 
Only in the mind of twisted leftists does this make sense. New York State is energy-hungry. Yet our state “leaders” demand we begin to phase out the one source of energy that provides something like 90% of all energy in the state: Natural gas and oil. You have to replace all that energy somehow. The answer for home heating, in the minds of leftists, is to drill geothermal wells. The state is *requiring* the state’s seven largest utilities to launch at least one geothermal project (and up to five such projects) to get the ball rolling. So here’s what happens. Instead of a gas driller drilling one well that produces enough energy for thousands of surrounding households, geothermal drillers must drill hundreds of wells (400 in our example below!) to produce enough energy for a few dozen households, plus some businesses. Same darned hole in the ground, yet if it’s for natural gas or oil drilled in the countryside where nobody sees it, it’s Satanic. But, drilling several hundred of the same holes in the ground for geothermal — in densely populated urban neighborhoods — is angelic. How do you figure, New York State?
LS Power, headquartered in New York City, has developed or acquired 47,000 MW of power generation, including utility-scale solar, wind, hydro, battery energy storage, and natural gas-fired facilities. We’ve previously mentioned LS Power in a number of MDN articles (
Rigzone asked several U.S.-based oil and gas recruitment experts what themes will dominate oil and gas recruitment this year. What kind of job opportunities will American oil and gas provide this year? One respondent said jobs will continue to be field engineering and specialist roles, jobs not requiring degreed engineers or geoscience professionals. What about drilling specialists, tool pushers, etc.?
U.S. natural gas and power prices hit multi-year highs on Friday with the prospect of frigid temps and snow storms in various portions of the country. The extreme cold was expected to bring record gas demand and cut supplies by freezing wells. The spot price of natural gas at various trading hubs from the West Coast to Middle America to the East Coast all jumped. Of particular interest for us, spot gas prices at the Eastern Gas South hub, widely considered the “benchmark” for the Marcellus/Utica, jumped from $2.45 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) on Thursday to $10.40 on Friday — the highest price at that hub since July 2008.
The Bidenistas unveiled a new regulatory proposal targeting natural gas on Friday that would introduce an obscene new tax on the fossil fuel industry, punishing natgas producers that exceed a certain level of methane emissions. The Biden EPA, which took point on introducing the new federal methane tax, said it will help “tackle wasteful methane emissions” from the oil and gas sector, encouraging facilities with the highest emissions levels to meet or exceed higher levels of performance. The proposed rules would create a so-called Waste Emissions Charge, which begins at $900 per metric ton of wasteful emissions in 2024, and increases to $1,200 for 2025 and $1,500 for 2026 and beyond. Bonkers!