Antis: PA DEP Plugging Easy-to-Get Orphan Wells, Not Most Critical
In December, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro issued a press release and rang the bell to announce his administration had (at that point) plugged 132 orphaned and abandoned wells in just 11 months, surpassing the total over the previous eight years combined, with big plans to expand the program (see PA DEP Spending $44M This Yr, $76M Next Yr to Plug Orphaned Wells). Now comes word, more like an accusation, from Shapiro’s environmental left that the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) plugging program is picking the lowest of the low-hanging fruit (wells) to plug instead of tackling the more critical (leaky) wells that could and should be done first.
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Sometimes, we get a miracle. A liberal Democrat judge from Franklin County, OH, ruled on Friday that anti-fossil fuel fanatics don’t have the right to appeal a decision by the Ohio Oil & Gas Land Management Commission (OGLMC) to meet and award contracts to drill under (not on) several Ohio state parks, including the 20,000-acre Salt Fork State Park in Guernsey County. The OGLMC is scheduled to meet today to make announcements awarding contracts for several tracts, including Salt Fork State Park. We expect antis will try to derail the proceedings illegally. Grab the popcorn…
Members of the Wet Virginia State Senate voted on Friday to permanently retain a flawed oil and gas well valuation formula. The Senate vote comes after the House had previously voted to do the same thing (see 
On Feb. 15, members of the South Carolina Public Service Commission approved a proposed project to build a 1,020-megawatt (MW) gas-fired power plant in the state’s Lowcountry, in Colleton County. The project is a 50/50 partnership between Dominion Energy (formerly South Carolina Electric & Gas) and Santee Cooper (South Carolina’s state-owned electric and water utility). In a typical knee-jerk reaction, several Big Green groups are opposing the plan, in particular because of a pipeline that will need to be built to deliver Marcellus/Utica gas to the plant.
Although Shell maintains flaring and accidental emissions from its new multi-billion-dollar ethane cracker in Beaver County, PA, have not violated state and federal air standards, the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) says they have — on numerous occasions. Shell didn’t argue the point, and last May, the company agreed to pay nearly $10 million in fines and “contributions” to benefit the local community (see 
While drilling in Chester County, PA, in August 2020 in the Marsh Creek State Park area, Energy Transfer’s (ET) Mariner East 2X pipeline experienced an “inadvertent return” — nontoxic drilling mud coming up out of the ground where it’s not supposed to (see 
If this doesn’t take the cake. Venture Global has been screwing its contracted customers for more than two years by not officially christening its Calcasieu Pass LNG export facility in Louisiana as officially open for business (denying customers cargoes under contracted prices), yet during that time, Venture Global has exported (on the spot market) more than 250 LNG cargoes! It’s a sham, and everybody knows it! Venture Global got the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to extend the “must officially be open by date” for an extra year last year (expired Feb 21st of this year). And now, unbelievably, Venture Global wants FERC to extend it for ANOTHER year!
Democrats will never be satisfied until they tax you for breathing and even existing, which was perfectly illustrated by a proposal submitted by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) to its so-called Climate Change Advisory Committee on Tuesday. Not satisfied to try and force a Marcellus-killing carbon tax (called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI) on gas- and coal-fired power plants, the DEP now wants to grow RGGI or some facsimile thereof to “all sectors” of the PA economy. Are they TOTALLY INSANE? We have to say the answer to that rhetorical question is YES!
Last summer, MDN told you that a new system to assess valuations of shale wells in West Virginia had turned into a royal mess (see 
Earlier this month, MDN told you that several New York Democrat legislators were introducing a new bill to ban the use of carbon dioxide (CO2) in any process to extract natural gas or oil in the Empire State (see 
Earlier this week, MDN reported on a bill making its way through West Virginia’s legislative sausage-making process (see 
In 2018, Equitrans Midstream, the builder of the 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), proposed to extend MVP (when it’s done) by an extra 75 miles from the current terminus in Pittsylvania County, VA, to Alamance County, NC, to provide natural gas for heating and electric generation. The 75-mile extension is called MVP Southgate. Last year, Equitrans asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to extend Southgate’s project timeline an extra three years. FERC agreed in December (see 
The Iroquois Gas Transmission pipeline project called Enhancement by Compression (ExC) increases horsepower at three compression stations — two in New York and one in Connecticut — by an extra 125 MMcf/d, flowing more Marcellus/Utica gas into New York City and New England (see