2 Bills on PA Gov’s Desk: Monthly Production #s, Lease Termination
A pair of bills recently passed both the Pennsylvania House and Senate now sit on Gov. Tom Corbett’s desk that are sure to delight landowners and (likely) frustrate drillers. The prime sponsor and author of both bills is PA Rep. Tina Pickett (Republican, Bradford/Sullivan/Susquehanna). House Bill (HB) 2278 will require drillers to file monthly production numbers with the Dept. of Environmental Protection. They currently file every six months. The second bill, HB 402, requires a driller to present a “recordable surrender document” to a landowner within 30 days of a lease cancellation/termination. With such a document, landowners know for sure, they have proof, that they can re-lease with someone else if they so choose…
Read More “2 Bills on PA Gov’s Desk: Monthly Production #s, Lease Termination”
A hat tip and big thank you to national conservative news/blog site The Daily Caller–a major source of news both inside and outside the Washington, DC beltway. MDN was reading a story on a topic of interest to us in The DC–about President Obama’s EPA and Bureau of Land Management waiting until after the election until they unveil more onerous new regulations on the oil and gas industry–when early in the story we spotted this quote from/reference to MDN…
We won’t bother to chronicle, once again, the long fight in New York State over the right of a town board with 3-5 members deciding that every resident in a township will lose the right to use their property the way they want to (even though property ownership is sacrosanct under the U.S. Constitution). In the People’s Republic of New York, the mob rules. The rule of law is out the window. And so, a few New York high court judges who want to retain their posts under Gov. Andrew Cuomo, decided nobody really reads the Constitution anymore anyway–and that local town boards (not individual landowners) will now decide whether or not shale drilling will take place (see 
A disturbing bit of news. Officials in Waynesburg, PA (county seat of Greene County, in the very southwestern tip of PA) say about 4,000 gallons of a “gray, milky substance” flowed through the local sewage treatment plant and that the plant’s flow meters spiked up when it happened. In other words, someone, somewhere dumped something down a manhole and that something got processed by the plant and ultimately discharged into Ten Mile Creek. The disturbing bit is that the plant’s operators, along with the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), think the substance dumped may have been frack wastewater…
The Martians are getting an assist from THE Delaware Riverkeeper herself (Maya van Rossum). Get this: The Delaware Riverkeeper, along with another anti-drilling group called The Clean Air Council (both based near Philadelphia), have filed an appeal with Adams Township (Butler County), PA over the town’s decision to grant Rex Energy permits to drill gas wells 3/4 of a mile away from the Mars public school. In June, Adams Township supervisors voted 4-1 to allow drilling to commence, subject to getting permits from the Dept. of Environmental Protection (see 
We’ve got some bad blood happening between EQT–a big Marcellus driller headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA–and the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). The DEP has just filed a lawsuit against EQT to force the company to cough up a new record–$4.53 million in fines–for a leaky wastewater impoundment in Tioga County, PA. The fine comes a week after the anti-drilling PA Attorney General, Kathleen Kane, once again abused her office’s powers by filing criminal charges against EQT (see today’s companion story). The DEP says EQT filed for and received permission to build a freshwater impoundment at that location in 2012, but after the impoudment was built, they decided to change and use it for frack wastewater. Problem is, with a wastewater impoundment you need monitoring wells drilled around the impoundment and extra protections that were lacking because it was supposed to be used for freshwater only. EQT then built a second impoundment next to it for wastewater and did install monitoring wells, figuring those monitoring wells would cover both impoundments. The first impoundment leaked and, according to the DEP, EQT just doesn’t get how serious the problems were/are that resulted, and so they’ve slapped them with their biggest single fine ever. EQT is already fighting back both legally and with their own press release…