Hydraulic Fracturing | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Pike County | Regulation | Statewide PA | Wayne County
PA Gov. Wolf Supports “Full” Fracking Ban in Delaware River Basin
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, arguably PA’s worst governor in a generation, has just thrown in his lot with uber-leftists Andrew Cuomo (governor of NY), Phil Murphy (governor of NJ), and John Carney (governor of DE) to support a total, permanent ban on fracking *and a ban on any drilling-related activities* in the Delaware River Basin (DRB). Put another way, Wolf has just turned his back on thousands of PA citizens living in the Wayne and Pike counties (in PA) who could be, right now, benefiting from Marcellus Shale drilling.
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Yesterday two northeast Pennsylvania legislators–state Representative Aaron Kaufer (Republican) and state Senator John Yudichak (Democrat)–hosted a rally to promote proposed new bipartisan legislation aimed at luring a “world-class” petrochemical manufacturing plant to the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area. A big plant, on the order of the Shell cracker plant in southwestern PA. But no, not an ethane cracker. The kind of plant the two legislators want to attract in northeastern PA would leverage the huge volume of locally extracted Marcellus dry gas (i.e. methane).
A year ago we told you about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launching a new study examining the possibility of treating oil and gas wastewater and (gasp) releasing the cleaned-up wastewater into lakes and rivers, instead of injecting it back down holes in the ground (see 
Hey New York Islanders NHL team–you’re screwed. No new stadium because your governor, Andrew Cuomo has just directed his corrupt Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to deny a permit to build the Williams Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) natural gas pipeline, a pipeline your new stadium needs or won’t get built. You can thank Andy for blowing your billion dollar project. Oh, and residents in NYC’s tenement buildings who won’t have heat next winter because their landlords are being forced by the city to dump fuel oil and now have nothing to switch to? They can thank Andy too, as they huddle with their winter coats on in their freezing apartments.
Holy Toledo! Enbridge, a really big pipeline company headquartered in Calgary, Canada, is in the process of buying the 23-mile Generation Pipeline located in northwest Ohio for $100 million. Enbridge owns the Texas Eastern Transmission Company (Tetco), as well as a 50% share in the NEXUS Utica Shale pipeline in the Marcellus/Utica region. It is that later project, NEXUS, that prompted Enbridge to pursue a purchase of Generation Pipeline.
Another chapter in the long-drawn-out saga of the effort to build a 22-mile pipeline in New Jersey. In February MDN reported that New Jersey radicals had succeeded in scuttling a plan to convert an old coal-fired electric plant into using natural gas (see 
The best teachers (people) and the best teacher (method of instruction) have the same thing in common: Hands on. As in tactile, doing stuff, rather than sitting in a chair attempting to learn by information dumping. Particularly with elementary-age kiddies. Cabot Oil & Gas and Southwestern Energy recently sponsored the annual Vehicular Career Day where 400 fifth graders from school districts across Susquehanna County climbed into big rigs, buses, and emergency vehicles. The shale industry was well-represented. Needless to say, the kids loved it.
Speaking of the exploded Revolution Pipeline located in southwestern Pennsylvania that’s led to a driller declaring bankruptcy (see EdgeMarc Energy Files for Bankruptcy, Blames Revolution Pipe Outage), yesterday the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued an order to Energy Transfer, builder of Revolution, to “identify and restore or mitigate all streams and wetlands that it illegally eliminated or altered during the construction” of the pipeline. DEP claims ET “illegally” eliminated at least 23 streams and changed the length of another 120 streams.
Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), being built by Equitrans (formerly EQT Midstream), has just agreed to pay a $265,972 fine and submit a plan of corrective action to West Virginia state regulators to fix storm water runoff caused when building the 303-mile pipeline in the Mountain State.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has just upheld a lower court opinion that allows shale drilling to happen *anywhere* in a township, so long as such drilling satisfies standards to protect public health, safety and welfare. This is the end of the road for a lawsuit funded by Big Green that began in 2015 in Westmoreland County, PA.
Advanced Power Services finally breaks ground…TODAY…on building an 1,100 megawatt Utica-fired electric plant in Columbiana County, OH (see 
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette seems to be doing its best to tie what it calls a “cancer cluster” to local shale drilling in the region. We first noticed a developing story about a potential cluster of rare Ewing sarcoma cancer cases among children in the Pittsburgh region a few months ago, when Pittsburgh media first began to report on it.
In the coming month, the U.S.’s seven major shale plays will produce a cumulative 80.7 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of natural gas, the first time shale production has passed that milestone. Yesterday our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, issued our favorite monthly report, the Drilling Productivity Report. The DPR is a forecast of oil and gas production in the country’s major shale plays for the coming month, made by the expert number crunchers at EIA. The Marcellus/Utica is forecast to increase production an amazing 1/3 Bcf in the next 30 days, for a second month in a row.
Guess we should have seen this one coming. Last week MDN told you that U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected an appeal by the rich snobs from Cooperstown that call themselves Otsego 2000, challenging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) approval of Dominion Energy’s New Market Project to build two new compressor stations in Upstate NY (see 
You know who anti-vaxxers are, right? The parents who won’t give their children vaccines because they fear the vaccines may give their kids autism or allergies. Because of this anti-vaxxer movement, there’s been a recent resurgence in measles–particularly in New York City. A group calling themselves Physicians for Social Responsibility is trotting out scare tactics to oppose a pipeline compressor station in Weymouth, Massachusetts. One writer calls them the anti-vaxxers of energy. We love it!