PA DEP Releases VOC Reg to Control Conventional Well Emissions
As we told you last week, the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) was long ago supposed to have reintroduced a new set of regulations for the conventional oil and gas industry in the state to control methane emissions (see PA DEP Playing Beat the Clock with VOC Reg for Conventional Wells). The method used by the DEP for controlling methane emissions in shale wells, and intends to do with conventional wells, is by controlling VOCs, or volatile organic compounds. Control one, and you control the other, supposedly. The DEP is playing “beat the clock” because if new regs are not in place by the end of this year, the federal government is threatening to withhold $500 million (or more) in federal highway funds from the state. Wonder of wonders, the DEP issued a draft of their proposed conventional regs late Friday night and will discuss them at a meeting of the Environmental Quality Board (EQB) tomorrow. Unfortunately, what the DEP issued is the same-old-same-old.
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Help! We’re in a nightmare, and we can’t wake up! It feels like we’re in one of those interminable Halloween movies (there’s a new one coming out this month called Halloween Ends, can you believe it?). Picture this: A president who already tilts far to the left and has dementia manages to sucker a “moderate” Democrat from West Virginia to vote for a falsely named climate bill (calling it Inflation Reduction), getting the bill passed. And that bill contains $40 BILLION for the federal EPA to use for (among other things) concocting new regulations to impose on the oil and gas industry, circumventing states’ rights as enumerated under the U.S. Constitution. The EPA is about to unleash those onerous new regulations–this week–just in time for Halloween! God help us all.
We’ve heard of vegetable gardens. We’ve heard of flower gardens. We’ve heard of rose gardens. Remember the Lynn Anderson song, “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden”? We’ve also heard of rock gardens, raised gardens, herb gardens, and indoor gardens. One garden we hadn’t heard about until today is a “rain garden.” Ever heard that term? Rice Energy (now part of EQT Corporation) is paying a big fine, $147,250, for work done at a well site in Greene County, PA, in 2019 that allowed erosion and soil to contaminate not one but three rain gardens. I beg your pardon!
So what happens now that Joe Manchin’s plan to get his fellow Democrats to vote for a bill to finish up the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a “permitting reform” bill, is dead (see 
In July, the PA Independent Regulatory Review Commission (IRRC) voted 5-0 to approve Part I of the final Environmental Quality Board (EQB) regulation that supposedly will capture every last molecule of stray methane that leaks from shale drilling operations (see 
The world is currently in the midst of its third great energy crisis. The first came in 1973 (remember the long gas lines?) when the U.S. sided with Israel in the Yom Kippur war. OPEC (an enemy of Israel and the U.S.) tried to punish us by cutting off oil shipments. We should have learned back then. We didn’t. Near the end of the 1970s, when Islamic fundamentalists took over in Iran, we experienced our next great energy crisis (prices for oil doubled). And now, in 2021/2022, we are in the throes of our third worldwide energy crisis. But this time it is different. Instead of Middle Eastern despots being at the root of this crisis, it is self-inflicted–an irrational war against fossil energy by Joe Biden and those aligned with him on the environmental left.
In August, Jennifer Granholm, hands down the most incompetent Secretary of Energy ever to hold the office, sent a letter to seven major refinery companies threatening them that if they don’t scale back exports of gasoline, diesel, and other liquid petroleum products, Granholm will have old dementia Joe whip up an executive order slapping a ban on such exports (see 
Here’s a challenge to a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) pipeline certificate we don’t fully comprehend. In 2018 the Panda Hummel Marcellus-fired power plant in Snyder County, PA roared to life (see 
Yesterday was the first day of the two-day Shale Insight conference being held in Erie, PA. By all accounts, it was a great day. Among the all-stars presenting were Toby Rice, CEO of EQT Corporation, Nick Dell’Osso, CEO of Chesapeake Energy, Greg Floerke, COO of MPLX, and Neil Chatterjee, former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman. The important role of LNG, pipelines, regulations, and more were discussed. One of the themes of the day: Natural gas is not a bridge fuel, but the destination.
After the shocking news that U.S. Senator Joe Manchin had sold out his state and the entire country by agreeing to support the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) bill, the details began to come out about just how bad this bill really is for the oil and gas industry. First and foremost, it slaps a new tax on oil and gas activities (see 
We’ll say it right up front: We told you so. From the beginning, when U.S. Senator Joe Manchin announced he had sold out the country and would vote in favor of the horrible (misnamed) Inflation Reduction Act in return for a promise from Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to pass a “permitting reform” bill that guarantees to finish the stalled (95% complete) Mountain Valley Pipeline, we told you it was a bad deal (see 
In a clear sign the Democrat Party is desperate with a national election (national referendum on Biden) just 44 days away, our beneficent Dictator in Chief, Joe Biden, has demanded that companies running gas stations, “Bring down the prices you’re charging at the pump to reflect the cost you pay for the product. Do it now. Do it now. Not a month from now — do it now.” He sounded like a raging lunatic when he said it. High prices at the pump are the result of Biden’s own socialist, very misguided policies. Yet he attempts to scapegoat and blame it on the thousands of individual companies that vend gasoline in a free-and-open market.
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm attended a gathering of leftist nutballs (she was in good company) in Pittsburgh on Friday at the so-called Global Clean Energy Action Forum to announce the Dept. of Energy (DOE) has finally gotten off its rear-end and has officially opened the application process for states and regions and even private entities to lobby her in an attempt to attract a regional hydrogen hub. The Biden infrastructure bill, signed into law last November, was originally said to be funding $8 billion for “four” regional hydrogen hubs, with each hub getting roughly $2 billion (see 
Republicans in the Pennsylvania Senate have, since April 2021, refused to appoint new members to the five-member Public Utility Commission in response to Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf’s unilateral push to force the state to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) carbon tax scheme (see