Anadarko | Chesapeake Energy | Energy Companies | Industrywide Issues | Lease & Royalty Payments | Litigation | Pennsylvania | Statewide PA
Revisiting the PA AG Royalty Case Against Chesapeake Energy
It’s time to revisit a long-festering royalty lawsuit against Chesapeake Energy and Anadarko Petroleum filed by the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office. The case has been through several layers of courts and finally ended up at the PA Supreme Court last fall (see PA Supremes to Consider Long-Running Chesapeake Royalty Lawsuit). The lawsuit hinges on the answer to this question: Are landowners/royalty owners the buyers or the sellers in cases of royalty leases?
Read More “Revisiting the PA AG Royalty Case Against Chesapeake Energy”
Last week we brought you the rumor that a bill to allow incentives for petrochemical plants willing to build new facilities in Pennsylvania (generating hundreds of jobs and hundreds of millions of investment in the state) appears to be back on after the bill was vetoed by Gov. Tom Wolf earlier this year (see 
How much of an effort is “enough” when a surface landowner in Ohio tries to locate the owner(s) of the belowground mineral rights under his or her land using the Dormant Mineral Act (DMA)? Is it enough to search the public record archive in the county where the land is located? The Ohio Supreme Court recently ruled in a case to say no, it’s not enough to run a quick search in one county when attempting to locate mineral rights owners.
Joe Biden is not only corrupt and senile, he’s now trying the same old ruse politicians always pull when trying to get elected: He’s outright lying in order to buy votes. All through the primary Biden has promised to kill off fracking and eliminate the use of oil and natural gas in the United States. Those are his words (see 
Do you remember the child’s game called “Simon Says”? That’s what we were thinking when we read about a lawsuit in Ohio by landowners against a group of shale drillers. The lawsuit, initiated by several landowners in Belmont County, OH, claims the drillers drilled too deep–into the Point Pleasant rock layer–when the leases signed only mention the Utica rock layer. The lawsuit, which is seeking class action status, claims “unjust enrichment” by the drillers.
West Virginia University (WVU) has created a new “
Last December the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) Environmental Quality Board approved onerous new regulations that supposedly will capture every last molecule of stray methane that leaks from shale drilling operations (see 
In our weekly tracking of the Enverus rig count, the numbers from the latest report (as of Wednesday) show a new record low of 276 active rigs. Quite disturbing for us is that comparing Wednesday of this week with Wednesday of last week, the Marcellus/Utica rig count is down by a whopping six. Ouch. The rig apocalypse continues.
In June 2018, EV Energy Partners (EVEP), the drilling subsidiary of EnerVest, emerged from bankruptcy court a mere two months after entering with $355 million of debt erased and sporting a new name: Harvest Oil & Gas Corp. (see 
In April 2019, Pennsylvania State Rep. Mike Turzai, Speaker of the House (who has since resigned and left), along with a group of conservative Republicans, announced a plan for the future of PA (see 
Yesterday the Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted 130 to 71 (with overwhelming bipartisan support) to pass House Bill (HB) 2025 which would block Gov. Wolf’s attempt to force PA into a northeast carbon tax scheme. We’ve written plenty about Wolf’s plan to force the state to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI (see 
Shame on Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary Pat McDonnell for prostituting himself to Gov. Tom Wolf by teasing a forthcoming “report” that says by enacting a jobs-killing carbon tax in the state it will generate 27,000 new jobs, add $1.9 billion to the PA economy, and even save lives. (Maybe the carbon tax can part the Red Sea too?) These are outrageous lies. Perhaps McDonnell should have resigned if Wolf was pressuring him to lie like that. Better to resign with dignity than damage your reputation for becoming known as a paid liar.
Can a single pipeline suddenly going offline in the Marcellus/Utica cause the biggest daily drop in natural gas production across the country–ever? Apparently it can. Yesterday TC Energy’s Columbia Gas Transmission subsidiary announced an unplanned outage (for maintenance work) for the Mountaineer XPress pipeline in West Virginia (near Leach, Kentucky). The “force majeure” outage knocked nearly 2 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of gas flows offline until at least next Monday, July 13.