ODNR Seeks $6M from Austin Master Services to Cover Cleanup Costs
One of the significant stories of 2024 in the Ohio Utica was about Austin Master Services (AMS), a radiological waste management solutions company in Martins Ferry (Belmont County), Ohio, that handles fracking waste (trucks it for disposal). AMS ran into trouble when it ran out of money. The Martins Ferry facility where waste is temporarily stored went from a permitted maximum of 600 tons of stored waste to over 10,000 tons, in violation of its permit. The Ohio Attorney General’s office filed a lawsuit against the company in March to force compliance. Local newspaper The Times Leader, in doing a Top 10 stories of the year, provides an update on AMS and where things stand with the cleanup. Read More “ODNR Seeks $6M from Austin Master Services to Cover Cleanup Costs”
A leftist anti-fossil group calling itself Protect PT (Penn-Trafford), located in Westmoreland County, PA, backed with big money from Big Green groups, has for years challenged Penn Township ordinances that allow Apex Energy and Huntley & Huntley (now Olympus Energy) to drill and operate shale wells. Protect PT finally struck out (legally) at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in May 2020 (see 
In typical sleazy politician fashion, PA’s Democrat Governor, Josh Shapiro, is blaming someone else (the PJM grid operator, in this case) for problems that he and his predecessor have created. Shapiro recently filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) alleging PJM is mismanaging the grid and using inflated numbers that will cause economic pain for the 65 million customers who buy electricity in the PJM region. What’s causing the high prices in PJM, a region rich in natural gas? That would be former Gov. Tom Wolf and current Gov. Josh Shapiro insisting the state tax gas-fired power plants via the so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). 
An undisclosed shale driller has asked the Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission (OGLMC) to consider opening up an additional 4,360 acres of state-owned Egypt Valley Wildlife Area for shale drilling under the land. A new “nomination” for drilling was also sent to the OGLMC for 383 acres of Jockey Hollow Wildlife Area, located near Egypt Valley. Both tracts nominated for consideration are in Belmont County, OH. 
In January 2024, MDN brought you the news that the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) approved a plan by Catalyst Energy to convert an existing conventional gas production well on Route 646 in Cyclone (Keating Township, McKean County, PA) into a shale wastewater injection well (see 
Just incredible. Not only did New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, an extremist liberal, sign a ban on using carbon dioxide to frack wells in the state at the last minute before the end of the current legislative session (see 
It took a full nine months, but New York’s leftist Governor, Kathy Hochul, didn’t disappoint her radicalized base of supporters. The NY legislature (both chambers controlled by Democrats) passed a ban on “CO2 fracking” (uses carbon dioxide instead of water) back in March of this year (see 
Last week, MDN brought you the news that the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) had not followed up on the cleanup work needed for a shale well drilled some 12 years ago (see 
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally-owned electric utility corporation in the U.S. TVA’s service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. TVA is the sixth-largest power supplier and the largest public utility company in the country. In May 2023, TVA announced that it would convert the Kingston Fossil Plant (coal-fired plant) in East Tennessee to a natural gas-fired plant capable of generating 1,500 megawatts of electricity (see 
You’ve always known that there’s corruption in the federal government, right? With that much money sloshing around, people with sticky fingers show up and grab some of it for themselves. Today’s story of government corruption will blow your mind. Thanks to the Biden Infrastructure Law and the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, some $385 billion was earmarked to be given out as “loans” to so-called “green” projects (kickbacks to political donors). The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Programs Office (LPO) was delegated the responsibility to get the money distributed. So the LPO hired a bunch of independent contractors to help distribute the money, and the contractors (in some cases) are double-dealing—they are serving both the LPO *and* they are representing and serving the borrowers of that money. The DOE’s own Inspector General office is sounding the alarm and telling the LPO it should cease and desist from distributing another dime until safeguards are put in place and contractors with a conflict of interest are removed. 
An op-ed appearing on The Center Square website says Donald Trump’s pick to head the Department of Energy, Chris Wright, will lead an American energy u-turn upon taking office. The first sentence begins this way: “The United States is about to witness a complete energy reversal.” Amen to that! We have just lived through four years of an energy nightmare under the gross incompetence of both Joe Biden and Jennifer Granholm. 
According to Dan Eberhart, CEO of Canary, LLC (the sixth-largest wellhead services company in the U.S.), the world is bracing for another energy crisis this winter, with natural gas markets “teetering” on the brink of volatility. It would not take much to push the world into another run on natural gas supplies, which would push prices to “multi-year highs.” The “looming crisis” underscores the urgent need for robust and consistent American energy policies—something the Biden administration’s recent pause on new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export approvals has failed to deliver. The antidote, the fix for this fragile market, is the incoming Trump-Vance administration. 
Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), headed by the ultra-dumb Jennifer Granholm, issued a bogus “study” (copy below) arguing that no new approvals should be granted for additional LNG exports. The report (and Granholm, in a cover letter) argues that “the amounts [of LNG export facilities] that have already been approved will be more than sufficient to meet global demand for U.S. LNG for decades to come.” In other words, the so-called elites know better than the free market how many LNG export plants the country should support. Granholm argues in favor of a command-and-control approach (i.e., Communism) over a free market, free enterprise approach to approving new LNG exports. 
In January, Joementia announced a “pause” on any approvals for new LNG export plants (currently 17 requests in the pipeline) for at least one year while his people pretend to figure out how to measure global warming as a new consideration for whether or not to approve a project (see