$4.2B Invested in OH Utica First Half 2020; Downstream Explodes
Each year Cleveland State University publishes a report for JobsOhio looking at how much money has been invested by the private sector in the Utica Shale (and related) industry. CSU’s ninth Shale Investment Dashboard report (full copy below) was recently released and shows some eye-popping numbers. Total shale investment in upstream, midstream, and downstream from January through June (1H) 2020 was $4.2 billion, up 37% from $3.06 billion invested in July through December (2H) 2019. However, there are some key differences in the spending between the two periods.
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Ohio’s Seventh District Court recently delivered a ruling that affects landowners/rights owners as well as drillers. In Tomechko v. Garrett (full copy below), the justices ruled that “adverse possession” of shallow gas rights expands to include deep gas rights (i.e. shale rights) in cases where shallow production “modified the subterranean structure.” According to the legal experts at Frost Brown Todd, “the Seventh District’s ruling strains credulity” and has the potential to “have unintended consequences and will almost certainly result in greater uncertainty and litigation.”
Three Republican-in-Name-Only (RINO) U.S. Senators–Susan Collins from Maine (no surprise, she’s really a Democrat), Rob Portman from Ohio (kind of a surprise, although he is a swamp dweller), and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina (more of a surprise, he’s now reverting to his swamp-dwelling roots) have voted with every single lock-step, mind-numbed Democrat Senator (all 50 of them) to overturn President Trump’s commonsense tweaking of Obama’s extreme overregulation of methane emissions.
On April 6 the Weymouth, Mass. compressor station experienced its third “unplanned release” of methane and was shut down (see 
Here’s a connection we hadn’t made until we read about yesterday’s oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in PennEast Pipeline vs. New Jersey. The connection is this: The PennEast case also has huge ramifications for another currently-stalled M-U pipeline. Columbia Gas wants to build a tiny 3.37-mile, 8-inch pipeline under the Potomac River from Maryland to West Virginia. It is being blocked from doing so by the lefties in Maryland (see 
While the Philadelphia Inquirer has at least one reliable and objective reporter working in its ranks–Andrew Maykuth–the same can’t be said for the lefties who populate the editorial board at the newspaper. Yesterday’s unsigned editorial declares that “Fracking jobs will disappear. Pennsylvania has to manage the decline.” Like he!!. The lefties on the editorial board base their brazen (and false) statements on Joe Biden’s plan to decimate the fossil fuel industry with his warmed-over Green New Deal vomit. The editorial board presumes Biden’s attempts will be successful. They will not.
Dominion Energy is a huge company. Once upon a time, Dominion owned major pipeline assets throughout the Marcellus/Utica region. But in July of 2020 Dominion decided to sell their pipeline assets (and part of the Cove Point LNG export facility) to Warren Buffett for $9.7 billion (see 
We’re kind of speechless and dumbfounded–but perhaps we shouldn’t be. Last week President Biden announced a new program to be funded with $109.5 million aimed at figuring out how to convince fossil fuel workers to be happy taking a huge pay cut and installing solar panels and windmills instead of making far more money in a far more meaningful job working in fossil fuels. Brian Anderson, director of the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), headquartered in Pittsburgh, will lead the effort. How enormously sad that Anderson, someone we greatly admire, is out in front selling Biden’s bill of goods–the end of fossil energy.
Here’s a new truism of life you may not have heard before: Be careful that the corporation you climb into bed with actually has a spine. Interestingly, U.S. Steel in East Pittsburgh, whom you would assume has a steel spine, doesn’t have a spine at all! Merrion Oil & Gas found that out the hard way. Merrion, a privately-owned oil and gas company headquartered in New Mexico, signed a lease with U.S. Steel to drill a series of up to 18 shale wells on the Edgar Thomson Works property in Allegheny County. Following blowback from loud-mouth anti-fossil fuel nutters, U.S. Steel decided the project isn’t worth the negative press. So they caved and canceled the lease with Merrion. Shame on U.S. Steel.
The Biden-controlled U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has just granted anti-fossil fuel zealots enough rope to strangle the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) project, or enough rope to strangle themselves. We hope it’s the latter, we fear it may be the former. The “rope” in this case is time. The Army Corps announced Friday it will give antis an extra 30 days to comment on (complain, manipulate, lie about) a proposed water crossing permit for MVP in West Virginia and Virginia. Even with the extra 30 days antis still are not satisfied.
Here’s an interesting twist on building new oil and gas pipelines in Ohio. Due to a late filing made by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (Ohio EPA), from now on interstate pipeline builders will *not* need to seek and receive a federal section 401 water permit under the Clean Water Act from the Ohio EPA to build the pipeline. Instead, the pipeline builder can just ask the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a Nationwide Permit 12 (NWP12). Ohio EPA has been problematic for pipelines in the past (see 
Ohio’s House Bill (HB) 6 law granted billions (plural) of dollars to FirstEnergy in an attempt to prop up the company’s economically failing nuclear power plants. FirstEnergy is accused of bribing state legislators to pass, and keep passed, HB 6 by paying out $61 million (see 
In 2019, a truly dreadful, jobs-killing piece of legislation in New York State was passed (see