Munroe Falls, OH Repeals “Home Rule” O&G Regulations
In March 2011 Beck Energy drove a bulldozer onto private property in Munroe Falls (Summit County), OH with the intent of building a road to a drill pad where Beck had proper permits and permission from the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) to drill a well. Munroe Falls slapped Beck with a stop work order and said, in essence, “Uh uh uh, you need to jump through our municipal ‘Mother May I?’ hoops and get our permission for everything you do before you can proceed.” Beck pushed back and sued Munroe Falls and the case was appealed, eventually, all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court. In February of this year, the Ohio Supremes ruled that Munroe Falls cannot impose so-called “home rule” laws over top of the ODNR’s rules with respect to oil and gas drilling (see OH Supreme Court Strikes Down Home Rule in Gas Drilling Case). Last week Munroe Falls finally repealed their onerous oil and gas regulations, a fitting end to this years-long story…
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You may recall MDN has tracked the issue of potential LNG (liquefied natural gas) exports from Canada that would use, in part, Marcellus Shale gas. There are five such possible LNG projects, four of them based in Nova Scotia (see 
New York State’s anti-drilling Dept. of Environmental Conservation Commissioner, Joe Martens, is doing his best to concoct a litigation-proof Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS). The SGEIS is the document that will find too many “troubling” aspects of fracking to allow it in New York. Except there’s potentially a loophole coming in the SGEIS, if press reports can be believed. Fracking WILL be allowed IF it uses under 300,000 gallons of “liquid”–the liquid most likely being water. (A typical well takes 5-8 million gallons of water to frack.) The NY loophole of using up to 300,000 gallons of liquid leads pro-drillers like MDN to muse: Is there an alternative liquid, other than water, that can be used to frack a well economically at under 300K gallons? What if the substance is foam and not liquid–is foam exempt from the 300K gallon cap? Or how about this: Can a driller use 299,999 gallons of water to frack a well and get enough gas out of it to break even and wait until the idiot we have in office now (Gov. Andrew Cuomo) is gone and go back later and re-frack the same well once the 300K gallon restriction is lifted? Hey, it’s fun to speculate. We’re not trying to foster false hope, but we do wonder if there’s a loophole in the SGEIS that can be exploited so landowners and drillers (the good guys) can beat extremist environmentalists like Cuomo, Martens and Yoko Ono (the bad guys)…
GreenHunter Resources continues to aggressively push back against the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) with respect to barging brine from shale wells. Yesterday was the latest flare-up in the war of words between GreenHunter and the USCG. Once again GreenHunter COO Kirk Trosclair said the way they read the rules, they have permission under existing 1987 rules to barge it. And once again the USCG said no you don’t–not until we say you do. The latest twist is that the USCG says that brine might have high levels of radioactivity and so now the Dept. of Homeland Security is reviewing the whole matter. Which is a neat way of corrupting the issue–just claim there’s a national security issue and that shuts it all down. Still, GreenHunter is committed to begin barge shipments this year. However, we also learned yesterday that those shipments will not originate at GreenHunter’s proposed facility near Wheeling, WV…
Where’s HG Wells when you need him? We’ve had another Martian sighting! At yesterday’s PA Dept. of Environmental Protection Oil & Gas Technical Advisory Board (TAB) meeting, Amy Nassif, representing some of the parents from the Mars School district in Butler County, PA, addressed TAB members imploring them to “keep oil and gas well pads away from schools.” Aaah, Ms. Nassif–what about well pads that already exist ON SCHOOL PROPERTY? Like the well pad at the Elk Lake School in Susquehanna County (see 
One more twist in what is shaping up to be a very long process to build the state’s largest electric generating plant powered by Marcellus Shale gas. Invenergy hopes to build the 1500-megawatt plant in the borough of Jessup (Lackawanna County), near Scranton, on an 80-acre former coal mine and landfill site (see 
Patterson-UTI operates (leases out) drilling rigs for shale and conventional drilling. They are one of the biggest rig firms in the Marcellus/Utica. They were also, a few years ago, a juicy target for the mob. The mob told Patterson that the goodfellas didn’t like Patterson’s hiring patterns. Patterson wasn’t treating all of its employees exactly the same. And the color mix of employees was a bit off for the mob’s taste. So the mob did what they do best–a shake down. Patterson could pay them big bucks and the problems would all magically disappear. It’s called protection money. The cost to Patterson to “protect them” would run into the millions–which is why the company originally opposed such a scheme. But in the end, Patterson caved and handed over $12.26 million in protection money to the mob. Oops. Did we say “mob”? We meant to say “U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.” And did we say “protection money?” We meant to say “settlement.” Here’s the details behind the shakedown of Patterson-UTI…