DCNR Blocks New Marcellus Drilling on PA State Lands
What happens when you put a virulent anti-driller in charge of a state’s forestry service, a state that previously had a small, safe, healthy program to allow some shale drilling, giving taxpayers a break with a source of new revenue? Of course the anti-driller immediately tries to quash any more new drilling efforts. And that’s just what has happened with former PennFuture president and current Secretary of the PA Dept. of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR), Cindy Dunn. We called for her firing back in June when she was caught using–we’d say misappropriating–taxpayer money to send her staff to Big Green reeducation events (see Time to Fire Cindy Dunn, Last of Wolf Admin’s PennFuture Radicals). But no. She remains at her post, obstructing drilling in any way she can. The latest in her efforts is an updated plan from the DCNR’s Bureau of Forestry, which manages 2.2 million acres of state lands, in which the DCNR pledges to block any new Marcellus drilling on state lands and outlines their plans to begin hassling those who own mineral rights under state lands (and can legally extract shale gas) by requiring “definitive proof” that they own the mineral rights. In other words, they’re going to try and tie rights owners and drillers up in so much red tape, they’ll never even think about drilling a new well on state land…
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For the past few days MDN has chronicled what we’ve named a royalties civil war happening between Pennsylvania landowners and the Marcellus drilling industry in the state–two groups usually on the same side. The war revolves around royalty checks–and how meager they are (see 
In April 2015 Kinder Morgan’s Tennessee Gas Pipeline (TGP) subsidiary filed an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to build 8.2 miles of new looping pipeline in Tioga County, PA and beef up two compressor stations in Bradford County, PA. The $142 million project is called the Susquehanna West Project. The project will increase capacity along a section of the TGP, bumping it up by 145 million cubic feet per day (Mmcf/d). All of the extra capacity is spoken for by Statoil and the wells they’ve drilled in NEPA. Good news: On Tuesday FERC issued their approval for the project, which means construction will begin in January 2017…
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 
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 