Safe Barging of Frack Wastewater from Pittsburgh to OH Begins Soon
Last December MDN brought you the exclusive news that barging of shale wastewater (produced water) had finally been approved by the U.S. Coast Guard and that it would begin during the first quarter of this year (see Barging Fracked Wastewater on Ohio River Approved! Starts in 1Q21). Don’t look now, but that fact finally appeared on the radar screen of environmental extremists who have gotten their favorite “reporter” at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to publish a slanderous hit piece on the safe barging of shale wastewater “up and down Pittsburgh’s rivers.”
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The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) has done a little more fundraising to underwrite the salaries of overpaid management. The DEP fined Olympus Energy (formerly Huntley & Huntley) for $175,000 in a “civil penalty.” What did Olympus do that was so egregious? After a hard rain some of the rainwater got muddy on an Olympus well pad and washed down an unnamed creek in Allegheny County. Oh, and the language on a sign posted at the pad site didn’t contain some of the exact “Simon Says” language on it, including permit numbers. The shame! The horror!
It’s interesting to observe how antis twist and turn *any* situation, no matter how obscure and inconsequential, into propaganda that supports their aim to end the use of all fossil fuels. For example, there was a minor, we’d call it routine, incident at a Mariner East 2 pipeline pumping station in Chester County on Monday night. A small leak of methane (natural gas) was detected in the pumping station. The leak was tiny and the gas didn’t even escape the pumping station. Yet antis are attempting to turn this molehill into Mount Everest.
Can we get an amen! We have an evangelist in the house. Toby Rice, CEO of EQT (the largest natural gas producing company in the U.S.) is preaching the gospel of natural gas. No surprise there. But what may surprise you (it did us) is just how much Rice is pushing natgas as the alternative to coal in power generation. In an interview with Barron’s, Rice declared we need “every tool” to end energy poverty around the world, and “natural gas is the most evolved tool” to do it. Amen!
Last week we shared the bombshell news that Cabot Oil & Gas, one of the premier drillers in the Marcellus, is merging with (being acquired by) Permian driller Cimarex Energy (see 
New Jersey Resources’ Adelphia Gateway project is a plan to convert an old oil pipeline stretching from Northampton County, PA through Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester counties, terminating in Delaware County at Marcus Hook, into a natural gas pipeline. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued final approval for the project in December 2019 (see 
Work has restarted on finishing the 92% completed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) in locations that don’t involve crossing creeks and rivers. One of the areas where work has restarted is the back side of Bent Mountain, south of Roanoke, Virginia. You would be amazed at the ingenuity and sheer guts it takes to build a pipeline–especially down the side of a mountain.
More negative press that Energy Transfer (and subsidiary Sunoco Logistics) doesn’t need for their Mariner East 2 (ME2) pipeline project. Last Wednesday construction workers were replacing backfill near the Glen Riddle Station apartment complex in Media (Delaware County, PA) when apparently they broke a water line to the apartment complex. The pipeline break left about 250 people in the complex without drinking water for more than a day.
New Fortress Energy, which likes to build and own as much of the LNG supply chain as possible, built and finished an LNG import terminal in San Juan, Puerto Rico in early 2020. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) then dinged the company, asking for an explanation as to why they built it without FERC permission (see 
Last fall MDN told you that a Marcellus-fired power plant planned for Clinton County, PA called the Renovo Energy Center, had come back to life as an even bigger project that will produce 1,240 megawatts of electricity when it gets built (see 
It’s been ten long years since Windfall Oil and Gas first floated a plan to drill a shale wastewater injection well near Dubois, in Brady Township (Clearfield County), PA. The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a permit for the well in 2015. The PA Dept. of Environmental Protection approved the project in March 2018 (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 bribed state legislators to pass, and keep passed, HB 6 by paying out $61 million to a small group of insiders, including the now-former Speaker of the House (see 
Here’s a new one for us. An oil and gas consultant says maybe we should just forget about fracking. Keep drilling oil and gas wells, but don’t use fracking. He says natural micro and macro fractures already exist in the rock and if you drill it right using a technique called “Near Balanced Reservoir Drilling,” you can tap existing deposits of gas and oil at half the price. Is he right?
We never thought we would write these words: The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Joe Biden is even worse than it was under Barack Hussein Obama. Biden’s choice to head the EPA, North Carolina’s Michael Regan, is aggressively targeting natural gas, attempting to harm the industry in any way he can. This week he’s targeted natgas in two specific ways: (1) by encouraging FERC to reclassify new pipeline projects as “stranded assets” meaning they shouldn’t get approved, and (2) by repealing Trump’s rightsizing of Clean Water Act 401 permits, once again allowing states to block pipelines using the 401 permit, thereby harming their neighbors by blocking interstate commerce (in contravention to the U.S. Constitution). Regan is a vicious radical, totally out of control. He’s corrupting not only his own agency, but another agency (FERC) as well.
After record gains since the beginning of the year, two weeks ago the Enverus U.S. rig count slid backward for the week, with the week ending May 19 losing 12 rigs (see