PA Releases Study on Bakken Crude Shipments Passing Through
God protect us from politicians whose “top priority” is to protect us. MDN previously told you that America’s most liberal governor, PA Gov. Tom Wolf, hired a high-priced consultant from the University of Delaware in April to do a top to bottom review on railway safety with a focus on how PA might better “protect” (i.e. prevent) Bakken shale oil shipments traveling through the state on the way to refineries (see PA Gov Wolf Takes Aim at Bakken Oil Trains Traveling Thru PA). The high-priced consultant, Dr. Allan Zarembski, has turned in his assignment with 27 recommendations (full copy of his report below). In eyeballing the list some of the recommendations certainly look reasonable: slow down to 35 mph if you’re passing through a city with a population of 100,000 or more; test the tracks three times a year; hire inspectors who know what they’re doing; etc. We suspect when the experts at Norfolk Southern and CSX have had a chance to review the report we’ll hear how these recommendations are intended to slow or stop crude by rail (CBR) shipments through PA. We’d like to be wrong about that, but given Wolf’s behavior an uppity attitude toward the railroads so far, we’re pretty sure we aren’t wrong…
Read More “PA Releases Study on Bakken Crude Shipments Passing Through”
GreenHunter Resources, the fresh water and wastewater subsidiary of driller Magnum Hunter Resources, has changed strategies and has backed off their tough talk in dealing with the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) with respect to barging brine down the Ohio River. You may recall MDN was the first to decipher just what was going on between GreenHunter and the USCG with respect to GreenHunter’s intention on barging (see 
The Chief of the Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management for the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (currently Rick Simmers) is a man with a lot of power. He has the power, according to a ruling just handed down on August 12, to make his own decisions about suspending permits to operate in the absence of specific violations of a law or regulation. In September 2014 Simmers suspended permits for two wastewater injection wells in Trumbull County, OH after a very low level earthquake was detected close to those wells (an earthquake that couldn’t be felt at the surface and caused no damage of any kind). American Water Management Services sued saying they hadn’t violated any laws or regulations on the books and their permits could not just be arbitrarily revoked like that. But the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission said nope–Tom Cruise, er, a, Mr. Simmers can arbitrarily do what he wants when there is no specific rule or guideline or law–because he has the best interests of the people at heart…
Major changes are on the way for Pennsylvania’s conventional (vertical) and unconventional (shale/horizontal) drillers. In 2011 PA began a process that’s gone on way too long, to update certain regulations that apply to oil and gas drillers known as Chapter 78 of the 1984 Oil and Gas Act. Along the way the PA legislature decided there should be separate rules governing conventional and unconventional drilling–so Chapter 78 has become Chapter 78 (conventional) and 78a (unconventional). PA was close to adopting the new rules at the end of the Tom Corbett administration but then he lost his bid for re-election, throwing the process into turmoil once again with newly elected Tom Wolf and his PennFuture buddies wanting to put their own stamp on drilling regulations in the Keystone State (see 
Some more details about the brilliant move by some average farmers in Tioga County, NY who plan to use propane to frack a Utica Shale well, bypassing the existing ban on fracking in New York because the existing ban only disallows high volume water-based fracking…