PA House Intros Bill Creating Energy Advocate with Veto Power
Last Thursday, Sept. 19, Pennsylvania State Rep. James Struzzi (R-Indiana) introduced House Bill (HB) 2573, which creates an Independent Energy Office headed by a new Energy Advocate with the authority to veto any regulation, policy or action of any state agency that “may harm energy reliability and affordability.” This bill appears to be completely different from a State Senate bill that passed on May 1 creating an Independent Energy Office (see PA Senate Passes Sen. Yaw Bill to Create Independent Energy Office).Read More “PA House Intros Bill Creating Energy Advocate with Veto Power”
In late July, the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) opened up the shuttered Austin Master Services (AMS) radiological waste management solutions company in Martins Ferry (Belmont County), Ohio, to begin cleanup work at the facility (see 
The Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) published a notice in the Saturday edition of the Pennsylvania Bulletin that says the SRBC’s Executive Director recently approved or renewed 24 general water use permits for shale gas drilling pads in Bradford, Cameron, Clearfield, Clinton, Lycoming, Susquehanna, Tioga and Wyoming counties in the Keystone State (full list below). Approval by the Executive Director is the first step in the process. Each permit will also require a separate water withdrawal approval before water begins to flow from the Susquehanna (and its tributaries) to shale well pads. 
In a statement issued last week, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) said it “remains concerned about maintaining sufficient natural gas supplies to address extreme winter conditions” for this upcoming winter heating season. In a “Statement on Criticality of Natural Gas this Winter” (full copy below), NERC noted that next month marks the one-year anniversary of the FERC/NERC/Regional Entity staff report on Winter Storm Elliott—a wide-area extreme cold event that affected states in the Eastern Interconnection from Georgia to Maine and from Nebraska to Pennsylvania. The primary cause of that almost-outage was, says NERC and the report, reduced production (freezeoffs) at Marcellus/Utica wells. 
Toby Rice, CEO of EQT Corporation, currently the largest natural gas producer in the U.S., spoke yesterday at the Gastech event in Houston. Rice expressed his view that the Henry Hub price for natural gas will remain below $3/MMBtu “in the short term.” He also had thoughts on how long companies like his will continue to curtail natgas production. Rice said curtailments will “ease by next year” when more LNG exports begin to pick up. Said another way, Rice expects to continue holding back at least some supply for the balance of this year. 
Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Senate approved Senate Bill (SB) 1058 that would repeal the state’s participation in the so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), an illegal carbon tax enacted via executive order by then Gov. Tom Wolf in 2019 (see 
In February, the Ohio Oil & Gas Land Management Commission (OGLMC) met to award contracts to drill under (not on) several Ohio state parks, including 5,700 acres of the 20,000-acre Salt Fork State Park in Guernsey County (see 
The radicalized Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), in partnership with the equally radicalized Moms Clean Air Force (MCAF), is joining forces with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and (very oddly) McGill University, which is located in Montreal, Quebec (Canada) to launch a project to identify and “facilitate remediation of” orphan and abandoned oil and gas wells across Western Pennsylvania. The group will fly specially outfitted drones about 100 feet above ground in Clarion, Venango, and McKean counties in western PA to try and identify and catalog orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells. 
In yet another attempt to deflect attention away from Kamala Harris’ extreme position on fracking (she wanted to ban it completely everywhere in 2019), mainstream news continues to publish stories on other Pennsylvania energy topics. For example, yesterday, the New York Times published a story with this headline: “Big Energy Issue in Pennsylvania Is Low Natural Gas Prices. Not Fracking.” We forced ourselves to read it all the way through. We “took one for the team,” so you won’t have to. The story started out fine and made some legitimate points. The NYT article is (more or less) right as far as it goes. The problem is that the article doesn’t go far enough. It stops with only half of the story told. Here at MDN, we tell you the whole story—all of the facts, not just some of the facts. 
In September 2019, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) gave its blessing to Eagle LNG to build a small LNG export facility project at a site on the St. Johns River in Jacksonville, Florida (see 
We spotted a report about an aboveground pipeline that flows shale wastewater that sprung a leak and released an estimated 12,600 gallons of brine (salty water from deep below the surface) on the ground in Gilmore Township, Greene County, PA. The pipeline is owned by EQM Gathering, another name for Equitrans Midstream, which is now owned by EQT. The leaking pipeline connects to the Trust Well Site owned by EQT. It sure sounds like a serious spill (12,600 gallons) with the potential to contaminate local water supplies—until you dig into the state Dept. of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) report on the incident. 
A couple of interesting developments with the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), which, unlike its dysfunctional cousin, the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), the SRBC continues to allow water withdrawals to supply water for shale fracking in northeastern Pennsylvania. The first development is that over the weekend (on Saturday), the SRBC Hydrologic Conditions Monitor showed low stream flows in some areas that triggered water withdrawal restrictions for water users, including seven shale gas water withdrawal locations (most of them for driller Repsol). The other development is that two days earlier, on Thursday, the SRBC approved new water withdrawal requests for 22 new projects, including eight from shale drillers!