Butler County | Energy Companies | Industrywide Issues | Litigation | PennEnergy Resources | Pennsylvania | Pipelines
PA Couple Sue Penn Energy for Trespass re Gathering Pipeline
Just coming to light now: A couple who live in Butler County (western Pennsylvania) filed a lawsuit on January 3rd against PennEnergy Resources claiming the company built a gathering pipeline across their property without their permission in early 2020. Joseph and Michelle Zandarski, who live in the town of Cabot, filed the lawsuit in the Allgheny Court of Common Pleas.
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According to super-secret sources talking to Reuters, Chesapeake Energy is in advanced talks to purchase Chief Oil & Gas for $2.4 billion. MDN brought you the news last October that Chief, a private company owned by Texas wildcatter Trevor Rees-Jones, was shopping itself for $3 billion (see 
In September MDN broke the news that Rockdale Marcellus had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania (see 
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In early 2021 Pennsylvania raised $144.85 million from its version of a severance tax, called an impact fee, based on drilling activity from 2020 (see 
Yes we predicted it and yes we were right (self-praise stinks, we know). We told you last year when the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) went forward with an absurd increase in the fee to drill a new shale well–from $5,000 to $12,500 (250%)–it would vastly slow the growth of new shale wells being drilled in the state and fall far short of revenue goals DEP hoped would fund the oil and gas program. Yesterday the DEP confirmed we were right.
Olympus Energy (formerly Huntley & Huntley) drills in the Greater Pittsburgh region, in Allegheny and Westmoreland counties. The company plans to drill a series of new wells (and well pad) in Washington Township in Westmoreland County. However, there’s a snag. Residents along a proposed road accessing the site don’t want the truck traffic on their narrow (18-foot-wide) road. Olympus doesn’t want to use an alternate route due to a sharp turn. Someone else proposed building a new access road, but it would cross a tributary that flows into the Beaver Run Reservoir (lots of red tape). The town is planning a couple of workshop meetings to figure out a solution.
The experts at S&P Global Platts have hauled out the old crystal ball–the one that looks at natural gas prices in the near-term (next couple of weeks to a month), and they foresee a rise in prices coming very soon. According to Platts, a drop in U.S. natgas production combined with colder weather that forces the use of natgas for heating which leads to tighter supplies means the price of natural gas will rise. How much and when?
EQT Corporation, the largest natural gas producer in the United States, announced last Friday that all of its natural gas produced in Washington and Greene counties in Pennsylvania (the majority of its production, some 4 Bcf/d) is now officially certified as “responsibly produced” gas by two different certification organizations: Equitable Origin and MiQ. That 4 Bcf/d of certified gas represents 4.5% of all natural gas produced in the U.S.