EPA Approves Potter County, PA Injection Well, Waiting Now for DEP
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 Clara Twp, PA Considers Illegal Home Rule to Stop Injection Well). Since that time, the federal EPA granted its approval for the project. It’s now over to the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) to issue a final permit, and the locals are not happy that they haven’t “had a say” to try and convince the DEP to deny the permit.
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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.
Last week it was a miracle when the three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (i.e. 4th Circuit clown judges) turned back an appeal of a permit issued by the Virginia State Water Control Board allowing Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) to cross some 150 streams and wetlands in Southwest West Virginia (see 
Yesterday, EQT Corporation and Context Labs announced a partnership to advance the commercialization of verified low-carbon intensity natural gas products and carbon credits. The partnership brings together EQT, the largest natural gas producer in the U.S., and Context Labs, an expert in distributed ledger technology, advanced climate data, and analytics. The partnership will help EQT prove that the natural gas it produces is low-carbon and responsible, and make it easier to market the gas to those who want to buy (and pay more for) low-carbon gas.
National Grid is desperately trying not to run out of natural gas for its customers in Brooklyn and Queens (on Long Island). It appears because of opposition from crazy leftists, they won’t succeed. For several years the company has fought a battle to run a tiny pipeline to its Greenpoint, Brooklyn facility to provide extra natural gas. That project is going nowhere fast. National Grid has/had a backup plan in case it could not complete the pipeline project–add two extra LNG vaporizers to the Greenpoint facility to turn trucked LNG back into gas that can flow through the system. It seems even Plan B is now gone. What’s left are coming gas outages for Long Island.