PA House Bill 170 Kills New Marcellus Drilling Using Setbacks
Danielle Friel Otten, a radical Democrat representing part of Chester County in the Pennsylvania House (since 2019), is a committed anti-fracker. She ran her campaign on a pledge to ban all fracking in the state (see 15 Candidates Running for PA House/Senate Want to Ban Fracking). Otten recently introduced House Bill (HB) 170 to “expand safety zones around oil and gas wells and related natural gas infrastructure.” What a joke! In plain language, the bill increases setback distances from 500 feet of a shale well to 2,500 feet–effectively killing any new shale well drilling anywhere in the state.
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As we reported back in February, the Biden EPA plans to allow private citizens to police oil wells and pipelines for methane leaks–meaning Big Green groups actually do the “policing” (see 
It’s not often we’re rendered speechless, but this is one of those times. To say we are incensed, that we are deeply concerned, outraged, etc. doesn’t begin to cover it. Last Friday, the film “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” a screen adaption of Eco-Marxist Andreas Malm’s book of the same title, was released. The film, which is a fictional story, justifies eco-terrorism. It encourages people to become terrorists and blow up fossil fuel pipelines.
An issue that’s been festering for more than two years appears to be coming to a head in western Potter County, PA. In early 2021, Roulette Oil and Gas applied for a Class II Injection Well Permit to drill an injection well in Clara Township. The leftists from Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) immediately began to whisper the siren song of “home rule” into the ears of Clara’s residents (see 
During a routine inspection conducted earlier this week by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), an inspector discovered two of 12 Repsol wells on a pad in Susquehanna County were (gasp!) venting methane into the atmosphere. Call the methane police! There’s fugitive methane escaping! The wells were drilled in 2016. Apparently, there has been an ongoing issue with these two wells since 2017, when the DEP determined the wells have defective casing and/or cementing.
In 2022, the first full year after emerging from the worldwide COVID pandemic, the U.S. and world economies rocketed. Inflation rocketed too, but that’s a different story. Because of the high price for natural gas and oil last year (in response to Russia illegally invading Ukraine), U.S. shale drillers increased capital expenditure spending by a whopping 54% over what they spent in 2021. What about this year? The analysts at RBN Energy have analyzed the announced spending by 42 shale oil and gas producers (with a market cap of at least $500 million) and find this year, shale drillers will only expand spending by a “modest” 17%. What about spending in the Marcellus/Utica?
In his first two days in office, Joe Biden declared war on the oil and gas industry. One of the first things he did was to revive an interagency working group on the “social cost” of greenhouse gas emissions and directed the issuance of an “interim” cost (see 
We don’t write much about RNG because, quite frankly, it doesn’t interest us. We’d rather punch holes in the ground to get natural gas than cap a manure pile to collect it. There’s a lot of hullabaloo about RNG these days, some of it coming from shale circles (which we find odd). Here’s the thing: If you believe producing and using RNG is going to address the concerns of anti-fossil fuel nutters, you are deeply mistaken. The wacko left that hates fossil fuels, including natural gas, hates RNG too.
Last summer, MDN brought you the news about a lawsuit against Diversified Energy and EQT over the issue of old and “abandoned” wells in West Virginia (see 
Freeport LNG is back online, sucking up 2.1 (or more) billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of natural gas, some of it from the Marcellus/Utica, exporting LNG to other countries. Freeport was out of commission following an explosion and fire in June 2022 until several weeks ago (see 
Within two years, LNG replaced all of the gas world markets lost coming from Russia. U.S. export revenues from LNG grew exponentially over the last six years. Export volumes and wealth from LNG could potentially lead to an astonishing $100 billion in new LNG developments in the U.S.! LNG will be a strong driver of U.S. natural gas production over the next seven years. The U.S. may double its exports, or more, from now to 2030. We are, writes author and petroleum engineer Ian Palmer, in the midst of a “Golden Age” for LNG. What is a Golden Age? And what does it mean for LNG?
In March, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) published its Annual Energy Outlook for 2023 (see 
Last week five Republican U.S. Senators introduced the Natural 
This is another in our series of what it’s like living “Behind Enemy Lines.” MDN editor Jim Willis lives in Upstate New York (Binghamton area). Our freedoms in NY are being stripped away at an alarming rate. The radical left is in full control of the state, as is illustrated by a recent debate between Gov. Kathy Hochul (a far-left radical) and others in the Democrat Party even further to the left of Hochul, if such a thing is possible. The people left of Hochul are resisting a reasonable compromise in the current budget that would change the current timeline for methane accounting from 20 years to 100 years.