OH Anti-Pipeliners Allege Some Letters to FERC were Forged
Virulent anti-fossil fuel nutters who are opposed to Spectra Energy’s $2 billion, 255-mile NEXUS interstate pipeline that will run from Ohio through Michigan and eventually to the Dawn Hub in Ontario, Canada, have stayed up late at night reading through all of the comments sent to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The habit of antis is to generate a blizzard of negative comments to FERC on any given project, sometimes using the names of their children (see Delaware Riverkeeper Scams FERC in Review of PennEast Pipeline). The antis say after reading thousands of comments supplied to FERC, they’ve found “maybe 200” that support the pipeline that are suspicious. In one case they said a letter was signed by someone who has been dead since the 1990s. In other words, the antis are alleging fraud–that pro-drillers or even Spectra Energy itself is engaged in fraudulently sending letters of support from people that don’t support the pipeline. Which is kind of funny, since antis themselves are typically the ones who engage in this kind of fraud! We guess it takes one to know one…
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Residents in Wilmot Township (Bradford County), PA are mad as hell over shorted royalty checks–and they aren’t taking it anymore. Yesterday Wilmot Township’s three supervisors passed a resolution demanding, “production be discontinued from wells where landowners are having their royalty checks diminished to nothing or nearly nothing.” That is, they want to block natural gas production from existing shale wells drilled in a town smack in the middle of one of the most-drilled places in Pennsylvania. We’ve long chronicled the fight between landowners and some (certainly not all) drillers who are screwing them out of royalty payments by claiming inflated post-production costs. The issue first came to prominence with claims by landowners signed with Chesapeake Energy, who claimed Chessy had cut a sweetheart deal with its former midstream company (Access Midstream) whereby Access bumped up its charges for piping gas which Chesapeake claimed as an expense and deducted from royalty checks, and then Access turned around and invested big money into the old mothership company (see 
We scored a copy of a refreshingly honest (blunt) assessment of the Marcellus industry in Pennsylvania. The letter was written by the Marcellus Shale Coalition’s vice president of government affairs, James Welty. It’s dated August 29 and was written and sent to all Pennsylvania legislators in both the House and Senate. The legislators have been enjoying themselves on summer holiday break and are now returning to work, with just a couple of weeks left in the legislative session. The PA House is in session for 2 1/2 more weeks and the Senate for 1 1/2 weeks (final day is Nov. 15 for each). There’s not much time left to handle the people’s business in 2016. Welty’s letter to the legislators is a frank assessment of the current down market faced by PA’s shale drillers. Welty tells lawmakers that recently adopted Article 78a rules will mean drillers spend an additional $2 million per well to drill–a budget buster for many drillers. He also says PA has the highest effective tax rate on drilling in the country at 12.3%. Although PA doesn’t call it a severance tax, it essentially is a severance tax and costs more than any other oil and gas state, contrary to the lies by Democrats who lust for more money to give away. Give this frank assessment of our beloved industry a read–it’s worth your time to see how the industry characterizes the current landscape in PA…
Two weeks ago the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (MA’s highest court) ruled that utility companies, which are heavily regulated and the prices they can charge controlled, cannot pass along the cost of a pipeline to electric ratepayers (see 
In June MDN reported on yet another new unlegislated law (called a “rule”) issued by the rogue federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that bans the disposal of wastewater from oil and gas drilling via public wastewater/sewage treatment plants (see 
Recently a group of 12 Pennsylvania state representatives held a hearing in Armstrong County, PA on the topic of separate regulations for PA’s small conventional vs large shale drillers. You may recall that new drilling rules from the state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) have been approved for shale drillers, called Article 78a, but not for conventional drillers, called Article 78 (see 
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has fined two CONSOL Energy subsidiaries, CNX Gas (the drilling division) and CONE Midstream (co-owned by CONSOL and Noble Energy) for coloring outside the lines when they built some gathering pipelines in four western Pennsylvania counties. CNX was fined $139,000 and CONE was fined $45,000 for veering off the path officially filed with the DEP. According to DEP spokesman John Poister, the numskulls didn’t pay attention and were sloppy (our words, his sentiment). Here’s the official announcement from the DEP, along with comments from Poister…
Last week MDN reported on the decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court to deny utility companies operating in the state to pass along potential costs of a new natural gas pipeline to electric rate payers–the people who would most benefit from such a pipeline (see 
Pennsylvania, like all states, is on a mission to combat the fairy tale of man-made global warming by reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (the stuff you exhale with every breath), and by reducing methane (i.e. natural gas) that escapes into the atmosphere. Global warmists have talked themselves into the belief that a little methane leaking here and there is worse than a supernova. Whatever. The Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) in PA is tasked with developing a plan to reduce CO2 and methane emissions in the Keystone State. They’ve just released a final version of their 2015 Climate Change Action Plan Update (full copy below). Among the suggestions from the brainiacs at the DEP is dressing up trucks in skirts (don’t ask)…