Accidents | Energy Companies | Energy Services | Industrywide Issues | Lycoming County | Pennsylvania | Pennsylvania General Energy | Stallion Oilfield | Wastewater
Truck Accident Spills 4,200 Gal. of Wastewater in Lycoming County
A truck hauling produced water–naturally occurring water from the depths that continues coming out of a drilled well long after it’s been fracked–overturned and spilled approximately 4,200 gallons of that wastewater. The wastewater, often called “brine” due to its minerally or salty composition, came from Pennsylvania General Energy (PGE) shale wells and was being hauled by Stallion Oilfield Services. It spilled on the ground “adjacent” to a “native trout stream” in the Pine Creek area in Lycoming County, PA.
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The evidence continues to pour in that the addition of Williams’ Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline, a 200-mile greenfield pipeline from northeastern to southeastern PA where it joins the Transco Pipeline, is having a dramatic and ongoing effect on natural gas prices in northeastern PA. As in, the price drillers get for their gas has doubled. Atlantic Sunrise went online in early October (see 
How much “diligence” is required when trying to locate the heirs of mineral rights owners in Ohio, as stipulated by the Ohio Dormant Minerals Rights Act (DMA)? That issue was addressed, once again, last week–this time by Ohio’s 7th District Court of Appeals. The DMA requires a surface owner to exercise “reasonable due diligence” to ascertain the names and addresses of mineral holders and their heirs prior to serving notice of abandonment by publication. The question is, what is “reasonable due diligence”? Is there a common standard? The 7th District decided there is no common standard, and what’s reasonable in one case may not be reasonable in another. In other words, it all depends–and is unique in each case.
In May of this year, Elizabeth Barnes, an administration law judge for the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC), unilaterally ordered Sunoco Logistics Partners to “cease and desist all current operation, construction, including drilling activities on the Mariner East 1, 2 and Mariner East 2X pipeline” in West Whiteland Township in Chester County, PA (
Last week the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency held an information session (to give out info) along with a public hearing (to accept comments) on the draft air pollution permit for PTT Global Chemical’s proposed ethane cracker plant complex in Belmont County, OH (see 
Well this wasn’t supposed to happen. The Delaware County (PA) Council hired a company in July of this year at a cost of $115,000 to conduct an independent risk assessment study of both the Mariner East 2 (ME2) and Adelphia Gateway pipeline projects (both running through Delaware County), to assess just how much risk each pipeline poses to residents in the county, a heavily populated Philadelphia suburb. A group of antis paid $50,000 to Quest Consultants for the same thing. The antis released their “report” in October (see 
Each year (for the 12th year running) the Canadian-based Fraser Institute surveys petroleum industry executives and managers (256 of them for 2018) asking them their opinions on the barriers to investing in exploration and production in various geographies across the globe. That is, what makes them more likely or less likely to spend money drilling in a particular location? The Global Petroleum Survey (full copy below), tallies the survey responses and ranks each geography from most desirable place to invest, to least desirable. Last year West Virginia was ranked as the fifth most desirable place to invest (see 
The preliminary numbers are in from the West Virginia Department of Tax and Revenue, and the numbers show that severance taxes paid by drillers in Mountain State hit a new high of $138 million, up 4.3% from in 2017. Six Marcellus/Utica shale counties–Doddridge, Wetzel, Ritchie, Tyler, Marshall, and Harrison–received $1 million or more of that back into county coffers. At the county level, the tax revenue goes for vital public services including first responders, community projects and social programs. Here’s a high-level rundown on who got what from this year’s severance tax honeypot.
It takes a loooong time for the wheels of justice to turn, but (usually) turn they do. In 2016 Kathleen Kane, former Pennsylvania Attorney General who prosecuted and persecuted others, particularly in the gas drilling industry, was convicted of committing perjury (i.e. lying under oath) about leaking privileged grand jury information in a case unrelated to gas drilling. She was, in October 2016, sentenced to jail (see 
Two weeks ago MDN told you about a class action lawsuit that’s been brewing in West Virginia since 2013, brought by 10,000 WV landowners and royalty rights owners against EQT over the company’s practice of deducting post-production expenses from royalty payments (see 
We pride ourselves on keeping close tabs on the market. Yet somehow the construction of a smallish NGL (natural gas liquids) pipeline gathering system in western PA slipped by us. The pipeline is now built and the builder, Stonehenge Energy Resources, is putting the “finishing touches” on the Stonehenge Laurel – Clarion Pipeline System before it goes live. The pipeline will connect to Laurel Mountain Energy’s wells in Clarion County and collect up the NGLs (things like ethane and propane) from those wells and flow it neighboring Butler County where the NGLs will hitch a ride via Energy Transfer’s Revolution Pipeline system to Washington County, PA where they will get cleaned up and separated.
In early October MDN reported that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit had “vacated” (canceled, overturned) a permit issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in West Virginia that would allow Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) to use a more environmentally friendly form of crossing four rivers in the state than is technically allowed under federal Clean Water Act regulations (see 
In August, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court handed PA drillers a partial victory in their quest to block onerous new drilling regulations, part of something called Chapter 78a (see 
Reuters has published a “hit piece” against Energy Transfer (ET) and two of its recent big pipeline projects–Rover Pipeline (in Ohio & Michigan), and Mariner East 2 Pipeline (in Ohio and Pennsylvania). Reuters is usually more balanced than, say, Bloomberg with these types of articles. Reuters usually doesn’t go out of its way to denigrate the industry. The article evaluates the number of permit violations issued for both projects. Together that number exceeds 800. Is that a lot? Reuters says they’ve analyzed “four comparable pipeline projects” and found an average of 19 violations per project (or 38 for two projects). So yeah, 800 vs. 38 sure sounds like a lot to us.