PA Supreme Crt: No Production, No Payments…Doesn’t Cancel Lease
Here’s an interesting lawsuit in Pennsylvania with potential ramifications for both landowners and drillers. In 2013 a landowner in Warren County, PA filed a lawsuit against Mitch-Well Energy claiming the company had abandoned its leases (and its rights) by not producing marketable quantities of natural gas from several conventional wells. The company had also not paid a required annual fee in lieu of production royalties. For 18 years! Several lower courts ruled in favor of the landowner. Last week the PA “Supreme” Court (we use that term loosely) reversed the lower court rulings and said in this case, not producing gas for 18 years and not making any payments to the landowners during that time is not (yet) enough to claim the energy company has abandoned its lease rights.
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The experts at RBN Energy continue their series of blog posts about pipelines that flow Marcellus/Utica gas to other regions with a look at two pipelines that connect directly to Canada: Tennessee Gas Pipeline and Empire Pipeline. In this post we learn that natural gas flows from the M-U over this past weekend hit a new record high of 17.3 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d). We also learn M-U pipelines flowed an average of 16.7 Bcf/d in April–an all-time high for any month! The problem is we’re now maxed out and need more pipelines.
If the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) thinks it is going to change the rules for how it approves existing, already-filed applications for pipelines, it needs to think again. That’s according to a group of both Republican and Democrat U.S. Senators who sent a warning letter to FERC last week. The Senators say FERC has no right to change the rules part of the way through the game, which is exactly what FERC, under Chairman Richard “Dick” Glick, is threatening to do.
Global warming nutters have convinced themselves that in order to prevent a global catastrophe, all fossil fuels (including natural gas) must be abandoned and never used again. It’s a lunatic notion, demonstrably so. The thinking is that hydrogen will replace natural gas and be burned in its place. The nutters further demand hydrogen be produced by “green” methods, namely using electricity from solar and wind to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The problem is, it’s EXPENSIVE. Prohibitively so. There’s a better solution: Split the hydrogen out of methane (natural gas).
Radicalized groups including the New Jersey Sierra Club and the Pinelands Preservation Alliance tried their best to abuse the court system to overturn permits to build a 28-mile natural gas pipeline project called the Southern Reliability Link (SRL) pipeline project. They have (we’re happy to report) failed. SRL will connect to New Jersey Natural Gas’ (NJNG) distribution system serving customers in Ocean, Burlington and Monmouth counties (in NJ) to provide backup for hundreds of thousands of NJ residents who lost access to natural gas following Super Storm Sandy. The NJ Superior Court’s Appellate Division dismissed appeals by the radicals to overturn state-issued permits for the project.
As we reported last week, after four months of steady increases in the U.S. rig count, the Enverus rig count “took a step back” with a decrease (see 
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