PA Charges Mariner East Pipeline $8M+ to Fix Marsh Creek Lake
While drilling in Chester County in August 2020 in the Marsh Creek State Park area, Energy Transfer’s (ET) Mariner East 2X pipeline experienced an “inadvertent return”–nontoxic drilling mud coming up out of the ground where it’s not supposed to (see Mariner East 2X Construction Causes Another Drilling Mud Spill). In this case, an estimated 8,100 gallons of non-toxic drilling mud came up in a small section of the 535-acre Marsh Creek Lake. It was a costly episode for ET. The state has just announced a gun-to-the-head “agreement” with ET that has ET paying a $4 million fine, spending another $4 million (or more) to dredge and fix the area, and $341,000 in civil penalties for permit violations.
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The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), lapdog of leftwing Gov. Tom Wolf, tried to bypass the state legislature and secretly push through and get adopted a proposed regulation on the state joining the highly controversial Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multi-state compact to limit carbon emissions from power plant operators (a carbon tax). The DEP just got caught red-handed.
Once again Democrat politics rear their ugly head to pressure the Virginia Air Pollution Control Board, which voted last Friday to reject issuing an air permit for a compressor station in southern Virginia for the proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline Southgate extension that will run 75 miles from Virginia into North Carolina. The permit would have allowed a compressor station to be built in the Virginia town of Chatham (Pittsylvania County). And according to critics of the pipeline, that’s just plain racist.
On Friday the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a new temporary emergency certificate to the Spire STL pipeline, a 65-mile pipeline that connects to and flows Marcellus/Utica gas from the Rockies Express (REX) pipeline to residents and businesses in the St. Louis, MO area. The temporary certificate means the pipeline will not have to shut down just as winter sets in, endangering the lives and property of more than half a million residents in the St. Louis area. Whew.
In October the province of Quebec, Canada announced it will expropriate all of the rights for all oil and gas companies in the province to drill and extract oil and natural gas (see 
We told you in October 2020 that a pair of natural gas-fired power plants in and near New York City were fighting for their lives (see 
Leftist tyrants are no longer content to block new shale and pipeline projects. They’ve been largely successful doing that. They have now moved on to attacking existing shale and pipeline projects, hoping to shut them down. Completely evil people. Case in point: The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) targeted the Spire STL pipeline, a 65-mile pipeline that connects to and flows Marcellus/Utica gas from the Rockies Express (REX) pipeline to more than 640,000 residents and businesses in the St. Louis, Missouri area. If the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) does not extend an emergency certificate for the project, it will close down on Dec. 13–in two weeks’ time. How does this new development of the left weaponizing our courts against us affect other existing pipelines? Will the darkness grow and threaten other assets?
West Virginia, the state legislature in particular, is up to its collective neck in a mess of its own making. The legislature passed House Bill (HB) 2581 on the last day of the annual WV legislative session in April. HB 2581 changes how the State Tax Department values producing oil and gas wells for property tax purposes (see 
An interesting back and forth took place (we’d call it squabbling) at a technical conference last Friday hosted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). FERC Chairman Richard “Dick” Glick pontificated that so-called global warming considerations must be made when evaluating new pipeline projects. He has used that excuse for years to vote against every single new pipeline project brought before him. Another FERC Commissioner, James Danly, pushed back and revealed flaws in Glick’s reasoning.
Yes, we as a collective society have lost our collective heads. So-called Critical Race Theory (CRT) appears to have brainwashed large swaths of our great land into seeing racism in every interaction and under every rock, tree–and now, even under the ground. Pipelines are racist! That’s the cry of the hard left, which unfortunately now controls our federal government. Three weeks ago we told you the Biden EPA had launched a film flam “investigation” (i.e. witch hunt) into a small pipeline aimed at delivering natural gas to a facility in Brooklyn so the gas can be liquefied and carted around New York City to prevent gas outages (see 
Vice President Kamala Harris, the disappearing Vice President (her poll numbers are even worse than Biden’s) visited Columbus, Ohio last week to tout the newly-passed so-called $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Wait, you didn’t know she was in Columbus? We didn’t either. She’s virtually invisible these days. At any rate, Harris failed to mention the key role fossil fuels will play in making Biden’s infrastructure plan even remotely possible to implement. Don’t worry, the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program (OOGEEP) has a column in the Columbus Dispatch providing “the rest of the story” that Cackling Kamala left out of her talk…