Clinton County, PA Petchem Plant to Drill 25 New Marcellus Wells

Earlier this year MDN brought you news about a new half-billion-dollar petrochemical plant that will convert Marcellus Shale gas into feedstock (chemicals) to be used in agriculture, manufacturing, medicine, and transportation, coming in Clinton County in central Pennsylvania (see $500M Marcellus-Fed Petchem Plant Coming to Clinton County, PA). The project is progressing and we have more details about what, exactly, the plant will produce.
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Sunoco Logistics Partners (i.e. Energy Transfer) was drilling horizontally underneath Snitz Creek in Lebanon County, PA for its Mariner East 2 Pipeline project when it experienced yet another “inadvertent return”–nontoxic drilling mud leaking out of a place where it shouldn’t. In 2018 the same thing happened and antis blew a gasket over a “spill” of five gallons (see
Anti-fossil fuelers, like those who write for and edit the Scranton Times-Tribune, are still spitting and sputtering that an $800 million LNG liquefaction plant is going to get built in nearby Bradford County and that LNG from that plant is going to roll through the Scranton area on both rail cars *and* on trucks. New Fortress Energy is building the project, currently on pause until early next year (see
In June 2017, the Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Foundation (PEDF) won a case at the PA Supreme Court by the skin of their teeth (see
In August 2014 the Utica Shale Academy (USA), a new high school dedicated to training workers for the Utica Shale industry, opened its doors in Columbiana County with 24 students (see
And that’s that! The first of 10 LNG (liquefied natural gas) mini-trains at Kinder Morgan’s Elba Island, Georgia export facility went online in December of last year (see
Pipeline builder Otis Eastern, headquartered in Wellsville, NY (western part of Upstate) has built a lot of pipelines throughout the northeast since its founding in 1936. In recent years the company has worked on a number of Marcellus/Utica projects, including Energy Transfer’s Mariner East 2 project and National Fuel Gas Company’s Marcellus Gas to Market project. Otis is selling itself for an undisclosed amount to a much larger company, Artera Services, LLC, based in Atlanta, Georgia.
Evolution Well Services, headquartered in Houston with a regional office in Pittsburgh, specializes in “electric” fracking–using natural gas from the well pad (instead of diesel fuel) to power turbines to create electricity that drives fracking pumps. Evolution fracks for at least one Marcellus/Utica E&P (see
It’s been two weeks since we’ve updated the Enverus onshore rig count numbers. The good news is that the Marcellus/Utica region is staying steady with the Marcellus at 25 active rigs and the Utica at 6 active rigs (paltry numbers compared to months and years past). The bad news is that the count for the entire country is down from 280 a few weeks ago to 275 as of yesterday. That’s still higher than the record low of 264 in July.
It’s been an uphill battle to complete Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a 303-mile Marcellus/Utica gas pipeline from Wetzel County, WV to Pittsylvania County, VA. The project has been vigorously opposed by radical environmentalists from the beginning. Frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit has been filed by Big Green groups bankrolled by billionaires. Finally in June Equitrans, the builder, said they should be able to complete the 92% done pipeline by next spring (see 

Oil and gas drilling giant Equinor (formerly called Statoil) is owned by the Norwegian government. Equinor/Statoil has drilled in the Marcellus/Utica for years. As recently as June 2019 the company reported drilling 9-14 Utica wells per year (see
We have chronicled the break between trade unions and Pennsylvania. Gov. Tom Wolf over Wolf’s stubborn insistence on forcing the state to join a carbon tax scheme called RGGI–the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (