SW PA Farmer Challenges Reg Preventing Shale Well on Her Land
Seven selfish Pennsylvania towns sued PA in 2012 over the zoning provisions in the then-new Act 13 law, eventually winning at the PA Supreme Court level (see PA Supreme Court Rules Against State/Drillers in Act 13 Case). The Act 13 victory gave townships and municipalities across the Commonwealth the right to pass local zoning ordinances that restrict, but don’t outright ban, Marcellus/Utica drilling. Towns with a majority of antis in charge got pretty creative and effectively banned drilling in many towns–like Jefferson Hills in Allegheny County. Now, a brave farmer, Carol Ann Bucar, is pushing back against overly restrictive zoning ordinances that prevent shale drilling on her 197-acre farm. Her property rights have been stripped away, and she’s seeking to overturn the zoning regulations that do it.
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It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything about Duke Energy’s plan to build a critically-needed natural gas pipeline near Cincinnati, OH, to replace an old pipeline built in the 1950s. We told you in April that Duke had, finally, refiled their application to build the new pipeline along an alternate route, with a few tweaks (see 
LNG (liquefied natural gas) is increasingly a critical part of the natural gas picture here in the U.S.–and in the Marcellus/Utica–as in exports of LNG. This year Dominion Energy’s Cove Point LNG export terminal in Maryland came online, and early next year Kinder Morgan’s Elba Island LNG export facility along the coast of Georgia is due to go online. Not only that, we now see a trend of setting up smaller LNG facilities inland, not situated along the coast, in places like northeastern Pennsylvania (see 
Antero Resources, one of the biggest drillers in the Marcellus/Utica, is also one of the best hedging companies in the business. They routinely lock in prices for their gas up to a year (or more) in advance, to ensure they make a tidy profit. And Antero averages higher prices for their gas sales than just about any other Marcellus/Utica producer. This morning Antero issued an update on their latest hedging moves, which is always interesting. But that’s not what caught our eye. They also issued a fourth quarter update. No, not for the entire fourth quarter as we still have a few weeks left in 4Q and the full, official 4Q update won’t come along until maybe the end of January. But in this interim 4Q update, we spotted the news that because of the addition of the Rover Pipeline, Antero now sells a full 30% (up from 16%) of their natural gas production to Midwest markets–markets that pay, on average, more for gas than elsewhere.
The “Beast in the East” (Marcellus/Utica) continues to roar, according to our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration. EIA publishes our favorite monthly report, the Drilling Productivity Report (DPR), a forecast of oil and gas production in the country’s seven major shale plays for the coming month. The latest DPR shows that the Marcellus/Utica region (called Appalachia in the report) will expand by another amazing 414 million cubic feet of natural gas production per day (MMcf/d). The increase is a response to new pipelines coming online in the region, carrying our gas to other regions where it fetches a higher price. Not only is M-U production off the charts, so is natural gas production collectively, across all the plays. EIA says that in January, production from all seven plays will go up another 1.1 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d), after it went up 1 Bcf/d in November (see 
In December 2017, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a final approval for the Mountaineer XPress pipeline project (see 
In June 2017, MDN reported that the Fresh Water Accountability Project (FWAP), a radical anti-fracking group based in Michigan, had filed a lawsuit against the Patriot Water Treatment facility and the City of Warren, OH, claiming the two treat frack chemicals at their respective facilities that don’t get processed enough–and consequently get released into the Mahoning River (see 
A year ago, in December 2017, Virginia’s Water Control Board issued a water permit/certification for the Mountain Valley Pipeline project–a $3.5 billion, 301-mile pipeline that will run from Wetzel County, WV to the Transco Pipeline in Pittsylvania County, VA (see 
Just last week MDN told you the first domino had fallen, when a federal judge in Pennsylvania granted the PennEast Pipeline project the right to survey and construct pipeline on a property in Carbon County, PA, the last landowner holdout in PA (see 
If a deed refers to a previously reserved royalty interest where the reference identifies the type of interest created and the person to whom the interest was granted (with no other details), is that sufficiently specific enough to preserve the royalty interest under the Ohio Marketable Title Act (OMTA)? According to a decision rendered last week by the Supreme Court of Ohio, the answer is, “Yes.” In a case with its roots dating back to 1915, landowners attempted to sever royalty interests under the Ohio Dormant Mineral Act, attempting to cancel the old interest because a 1969 deed that referred back to the original deal (of one-half royalty interest) was not “specific enough.” The 1969 reference didn’t include the volume and page number of the instrument that originally created the royalty interest. In other words, it wasn’t a “Simon Says” kind of thing–it didn’t follow the exact legal standard. The current landowner tried to cancel the original royalty sharing obligation via a legal loophole.
Last week MDN told you about onerous new regulations being proposed by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) to cut down on supposed methane and volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions coming from *existing* oil and gas wells and pipelines (see 
Last week MDN told you that Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, liberal Democrat, is seriously considering a bizarre cap-and-trade greenhouse gas emission reduction program to eliminate carbon emissions from major sources by 2052 (see 
There’s nothing like some cold, hard facts to shock the public (in particular anti-fossil fuelers) back into reality. Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) provided just such a bucket of cold, hard facts yesterday by issuing an update on the project. Mainstream media (MSM) would have you believe that MVP, a 300-mile pipeline from Wetzel County, WV to the Transco Pipeline in Pittsylvania County, VA, is on its last legs. About to be canceled for good. No hope of completing it. Yet, the facts say otherwise.