Bideniflation Begins to Ease a Little in U.S. Shale Basins
Inflation is a measure of the rate of rising prices of goods and services in an economy. Inflation can occur when prices rise due to increases in production costs, such as raw materials and wages. A surge in demand for products and services can cause inflation as consumers are willing to pay more for the product. But inflation can also be caused by the government printing and spending too much money. We refer to the current high inflation in our country as Bidenflation–caused by the Biden White House and colluding Democrats in Congress–because they passed massive, reckless spending bills. Much of that spending is being paid for by simply printing new money. When you have more money chasing the same amount of goods and services, prices go up. Inflation.
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The news lit up Friday afternoon with the latest rig count by Baker Hughes Co. (BKR). We always caution that weekly rig counts are not a reliable way to gauge drilling activity as the count floats up and down each week. However, on Friday, the bottom kind of dropped out of the natural gas rig count. BKR said the gas-focused rig count dropped by 16 to 141 for the week, which amounts to a 10% drop in a single week. That *does* get your attention. The general consensus seems to be that low, low prices (bumping around near $2/MMBtu) have finally taken their toll, and drillers are pulling back on drilling new wells. How many rigs were lost in the Marcellus and Utica last week?
John Love, who used to manage the United States Natural Gas Fund (the country’s biggest natural gas ETF), said in an interview with CNBC last week he believes the commodity price of natural gas has already hit bottom and will rise from here. Love says drillers are focused on the future–and the future is LNG exports. Love’s sentiments about the price bottoming out were echoed by a second expert, Teucrium Trading CEO Sal Gilbertie.
Earlier this month, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (liberal Democrat from West Virginia) introduced a permitting reform bill (for the third time) to save the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) from the clutches of colluding leftists who sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (see 
The PA Environment Digest Blog has been reviewing the reports filed by Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) workers again and noticed a situation at a well pad in Delmar Township, Tioga County. According to DEP reports filed, a Notice of Violation (NOV) was issued to Seneca Resources for a well pad located on DCNR State Forest land last September. Surface water samples from puddles indicate wastewater (brine) from one or more wells spilled onto the ground.
The haughty John Kerry recently granted the official media house organ for the Democrat Party, the Associated Press, an interview. During the interview, Lord Kerry said oil and gas producers keep saying there are technological breakthroughs that will allow the world to continue extracting and burning fossil fuels without toasting Mom Earth. He said, in so many words, it’s either time to put up or shut up. Kerry “doubts” that existing technology is up to the task of abating greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels. Meanwhile, Kerry travels around the globe on a private jet that belches out more greenhouse gases than any random 100 citizens of planet earth. It must be nice to be married to a billionaire (Teresa Heinz Kerry).
Yesterday the Bidenistas at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a hellscape of new regulations aimed at forcing coal- and natural gas-fired power plants to close. That’s the sum total of what’s contained in a proposed 681-page behemoth new rule released (inflicted) yesterday by the EPA. But that’s not just MDN’s wild claim about this hellscape being created by Biden. The editors of the Wall Street Journal called the new EPA regulations “An EPA Death Sentence for Fossil-Fuel Power Plants,” with the subtitle “The Biden agency’s new rule means the end of natural gas-fueled electricity.”
Yesterday two radicalized Big Green groups–the Environmental Integrity Project (based in D.C.) and the Clean Air Council (based in Philadelphia)–filed a lawsuit against the Shell Polymers Monaca Plant (ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, PA), claiming the plant has repeatedly violated federal air pollution limits. The lawsuit requests the court assess huge fines and force it close down unless it can operate without any further violations of the federal Clean Air Act (CAA) and the federal Air Pollution Control Act (APCA). In other words, the radicals seek to shut down the $10 billion plant and keep it shut down–throwing 600 permanent employees out of work. Nice people at the Environmental Integrity Project and Clean Air Council, eh?
When the public teat is full of taxpayer money, ready to dispense, and big business can’t get its mouth around that teat to start sucking, big business begins to whine and moan. That about sums up what happened at the Pennsylvania Energy Summit held yesterday in Pittsburgh. The Bidenistas went on a drunken spending spree over the past two years, unleashing what amounts to trillions of dollars to be made available for so-called renewable energy projects via the poorly crafted Infrastructure bill and the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. Now, big business wants to start feeding on that money, but it can’t because it takes too long to get projects permitted. Too bad, so sad.
Spotlight PA, a partisan Democrat “newsroom” (propaganda outfit) powered by the Philadelphia Inquirer in partnership with Harrisburg Patriot-News, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and WITF PBS Public Media, is taking aim at the conventional drilling industry. In an article about the “crisis” of unplugged orphaned and abandoned conventional oil and gas wells, Spotlight PA, via interviewees, says the $400 million coming from the federal government is not nearly enough money to plug some 200,000+ old wells in the state.
Since 2015 we’ve reported on the case of Grant Township (Indiana County, PA), a town that passed an ordinance cooked up by the radical Big Green group Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) to try and block a state-approved injection well proposed by Pennsylvania General Energy (
A laughably fake “report” just published by the University of Pennsylania (UPenn) and the far-left group Resources for the Future (RFF) makes this wild claim about the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a Marcellus-killing carbon tax scheme that will shut down most coal- and natural gas-fired power plants in the state: “Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative would lower Pennsylvania emissions, add to state revenues, and have little to no impact on electricity rates.” Yeah, right. UPenn/RFF are trying to sell a bridge in Brooklyn too, just in case you’re in the market to buy one.
Last November, MDN told you about a lawsuit filed by a family in Washington County, PA, against Chevron (now EQT) for drilling and fracking done in 2011-2012 near the family’s home (see 
Earlier this week, the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry, along with 67 other business associations and local chambers of commerce, sent a letter to Gov. Josh Shapiro and the PA legislature urging them to take “decisive action” in reforming the state’s “dysfunctional and unpredictable permitting system.” Among the signatories of the letter were shale groups, including the American Petroleum Institute (API) of Pennsylvania, the Marcellus Shale Coalition (MSC), and the Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association (PIOGA).
A group of 17 states, including Ohio and West Virginia, filed a motion yesterday with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) asking the commission to block BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, from forcing utility companies in which BlackRock invests to adopt so-called ESG policies. BlackRock buys up a significant portion of ownership in a company and then tries to force that company to stop using fossil energy via the back door of forcing it to implement ESG (environment, social, governance) policies. It is “woke” investing, plain and simple. And the Attornies General of 17 states have had enough of it.
U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a liberal Democrat from conservative West Virginia, is desperately trying to hold on to his job following the 2024 election. Manchin thought nobody would notice when he caved to pressure from his own party and voted to pass the devastatingly bad (and misnamed) Inflation Reduction Act (see