Air Quality | Allegheny County | Anti-Drilling/Fossil Fuel | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Regulation
PA Senate Democrats Hold Anti-Shale Crapfest in Pittsburgh
Yesterday the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Policy Committee held a hearing in Pittsburgh, supposedly on strategies for combating mythical man-made global warming by reducing methane gas emissions. It reality it was an anti-shale crapfest, complete with speeches by radicals from PennFuture and the Environmental Defense Fund.
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President Trump is “seriously considering” granting an exemption to the Jones Act, a federal law passed in 1920 that that regulates maritime commerce in the United States. This is seriously good news for the Marcellus/Utica, in fact for every shale play in the U.S. Why? How? Let us explain…
Since January 20, all of Sunoco Logistics’ Mariner East 1 (ME1) pipeline has been shut down on the orders of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (see 
Last Thursday, “more than 300” anti-fossil fuel nutters protested to “demand” that Gov. Cuomo block Williams’ proposed Northeast Supply Expansion (NESE) pipeline project. We have extensively covered NESE and the coming decision by Cuomo’s lapdogs at the Dept. of Environmental Conservation.
Swamp dwellers are recoiling in horror that the Pennsylvania House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee has just approved a series of bills that restores some sanity in how environmental regulations are made and paid for in the Keystone State. The bills begin, in a small way, to take back control of our system of creating laws, returning authority for making laws to the PA legislature, instead of creating and forcing laws on citizens by unelected, nameless, faceless, swamp-dwelling bureaucrats in regulatory agencies like the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). Let us explain.
Last November, a variety of Big Green groups including the Clean Air Council, Widener University Environmental Law and Sustainability Center, eco(n)law LLC and 61 others submitted a “rulemaking petition” (407-page plan) to the Pennsylvania Environment Quality Board (EQB) requesting the Board and PA Gov. Tom Wolf establish a cap-and-trade greenhouse gas emission reduction program to eliminate carbon emissions from major sources by 2052. It’s a bizarre plan, meant to eliminate fossil fuel production and use, including Marcellus Shale production. Yesterday the EQB voted to accept and consider this cockamamie plan.
During the signing ceremony on Wednesday when President Trump signed two executive orders to make it harder for states to block new pipelines for political reasons, Trump revealed part of the motivation for the EOs when he said, “And also, in New York, they’re paying tremendous amounts of money more for energy to heat their homes because New York State blocked a permit to build the Constitution Pipeline.” So we ask the question, will Trump’s EO actually help get the Constitution built?
Yesterday the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) Air Quality Technical Advisory Committee voted to recommend the DEP move forward with a proposed new regulation to control volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions, with a side benefit of reducing methane emissions, from existing oil and gas operations. It was a split vote, but it propels the regs to the next level.
Must be something in the water in Vermont. They elect people to high office like crazy Bernie Sanders and Pat “leaky” Leahy. And now there is a serious effort to pass a bill that will result in a ban on any kind of new infrastructure that supports natural gas. No more new local gas utility pipelines to new housing developments, no more new hookups for businesses locating in the state, no new hookups for factories, farms–no nothing. The reason? An abject, irrational hatred of fossil fuels. This cancer of irrational thinking has got to stop.
President Trump visited Houston, Texas yesterday to sign a pair of Executive Orders to help spur more energy infrastructure development across the country. In particular, the orders were aimed at clearing away roadblocks some states (like New York) put up to try and block new pipelines. Was it a silver bullet that will mean projects like the Constitution Pipeline will now get built? Sadly, no. But it was, according to many in the oil and gas industry, “a step in the right direction.”