CELDF Costing Towns Big $ With Losing Pipeline/Drilling Bans
Communities that attempt to block pipelines (and drilling) with illegal so-called community rights ordinances that seek to block those activities are losing in court and, in at least some of the cases, taxpayers in those communities end up paying the legal fees for the pro-drilling side. That’s the good news we find in an article by a PBS “reporter” (we’d call her an anti-drilling propagandist) writing on the StateImpact Pennsylvania website. To the small group of fossil fuel-hating nutters in Conestoga Township (Lancaster County), PA, you may want to consider the considerable cost of launching yet another campaign funded by outsiders Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), the shadowy group behind much of this mischief. Be sure to ask the CELDF if they’re willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees if you lose (as you surely will) a legal challenge to a pipeline ban in the township. Make them put their money where their huge mouth is…
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Well well. It seems by giving out the consolation prize of putting PIOGA (the Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association) and other industry reps on the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection’s newly created conventional board isn’t working out quite as well as expected for Acting DEP Sec. John Quigley (see 
Sometimes the CURE is worse than the disease. Such is the case with the anti-drilling Communities United for Responsible Energy (CURE) in eastern OH. The group agitated and squawked and carried on with such histrionics that they’ve gotten the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) to order an oilfield services company to shut down a satellite location in Jefferson County, OH. The offense? Depends on who you ask. The company, Anchor Drilling Fluids, says it didn’t have a permit to store excess drilling mud–the stuff used by drillers to keep a drill bit cool and lubricated and free of bacteria. The ODNR says Anchor was recycling at that site and lacked a proper waste recycling permit. Question: If you mix drilling mud at a well site but don’t use all of it, and you then truck it back to HQ to store it for a few days or weeks before taking it somewhere else, is that “recycling”? Apparently it is for the ODNR…
Pennsylvania’s Acting Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary, John Quigley, continues to come under fire from PA Republican legislators over his (so far) less-than-transparent operation of the department–especially over firing the former Oil & Gas Technical Advisory Board members and replacing them with his own people, including so-called “non-voting” members (see 
The Marcellus industry in Pennsylvania is none too happy with the performance thus far of Acting Secretary of the Dept. of Environmental Protection, John Quigley. As MDN has noted, Quigley first fired the members of the DEP’s Oil & Gas Technical Advisory Board (see 
In February, West Virginia passed a new law “fixing” an old law. The old law, which was itself a new law just a few years ago, stipulated if oil and gas leases/operations change hands, the new owner must apply for permits to drill all over again, even if the previous owner had already been awarded those permits. This was a really big problem for Southwestern Energy that had just purchased $5 billion worth of leases and operations from Chesapeake Energy, most of it in WV. So the WV legislature passed, in record time, a law to fix the problem–and Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin signed it (see