Norse Energy Shutting Down NY Office, Moving to Houston
For more than year, MDN has periodically reported on Norse Energy as they have struggled to hold on, waiting for New York State to finally start issuing horizontal hydraulic fracturing drilling permits (see MDN’s coverage here). Norse’s strategy has been to roll the dice that New York will allow shale gas drilling. Drilling is always risky, but betting the company on New York politicians is truly a Las Vegas kind of gamble.
In order to keep going, Norse has sold off various assets over the past year. According to their first quarter 2012 update (see below), they at least have enough money in the bank to keep their U.S. operations going through the third quarter of this year. And they still have a controlling interest in 135,000 acres in New York, much of it in the Marcellus and Utica Shale play areas, should New York finally get off the dime. But in a sign that they may be giving up on the Empire State, Norse is shutting down it’s New York office and heading back to Houston.
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The anti-drillers in New York are not content to block horizontal drilling. They increasingly have turned their attention to conventional, vertical natural gas drilling as their target, trying to shut down or otherwise harass an industry that has been safely operating in the state for decades.
Guess who’s now on board the anti-drilling bus? Peter Yarrow, of the sixties folk singing group Peter, Paul and Mary. Or as MDN editor Jim Willis used to call them back in the 1980s, “Peter, Paul and Commie.” Yeah, the singers of Puff the Magic Dragon have always been politically active—on the far left. In the 1980s they flew to Nicaragua to show their support for the brutal Socialist/Communist dictator Daniel Ortega. Why is it liberals love the commie dictators like Ortega and Castro? But we digress.
MDN reported earlier this week that certain key New York State senators (and others) were signaling that if/when hydraulic fracturing is allowed to go forward in the state, it may only happen in communities that support it (
In an interesting development in the long fight to allow shale gas drilling in New York State, two key state senators are signaling a compromise may come in the form of, “if you want it, you can get it” with respect to fracking. That is, communities that support fracking will likely be the ones who will get it, at least at first, and maybe they will be the only ones to get it.
Is it any surprise that eager beaver, go-get-em NY Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Joe Martens now says that his department’s review of comments on proposed new fracking rules won’t be done before end of summer, “perhaps”? No, not a surprise at all. This is typical Martens delay tactic behavior.