Austin Master Serv. CEO Asks Court to Block Jail Time, $1.2M Bond
As we have been reporting, Austin Master Services, a radiological waste management solutions company in Martins Ferry (Belmont County), Ohio, that handles fracking waste (trucks it for disposal), ran into trouble when it ran out of money. The 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 to force compliance. As is always the case, there are two sides to every story. The side of AMS and its owner, Brad Domitrovitsch, is not getting much media coverage. We have an update on Brad’s side of the story…
Read More “Austin Master Serv. CEO Asks Court to Block Jail Time, $1.2M Bond”
Austin Master Services (AMS) is a radiological waste management solutions company in Martins Ferry (Belmont County), Ohio. The Ohio Attorney General lodged charges against AMS in March, accusing the company of storing 16+ times more drill cuttings at the facility than it’s rated for (see 
In the fall of 2021, President Biden signed into law the so-called Infrastructure Bill, some $1.2 trillion in pork barrel spending, passed with the help of turncoat Republicans (see 
For the week of July 8 – 14, a total of 31 permits were issued to drill new shale wells in Marcellus/Utica. Pennsylvania had a nice increase with 25 new permits issued. A full 9 of PA’s permits went to Snyder Brothers for a single well in Armstrong County. Another 6 permits went to EQT in PA’s Greene and Washington counties. There were 5 new permits in Ohio, all of them going to Encino Energy for a single pad in Guernsey County. West Virginia had a single new permit going to EQT in Wetzel County.
In early June, the owner of Austin Master Services (AMS), American Environmental Partners (AEP), sent a press announcement to MDN to announce he had found a buyer for AMS (see 
According to Public News Service (PNS), a Big Green propaganda outfit funded (in part) by the Fresh Water Accountability Project, the CEO of Austin Master Services (AMS), a frack waste storage facility in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, was supposed to attend a Belmont County court hearing by phone. He faces contempt-of-court charges for failing to clean up 10,000 tons of waste. However, it wasn’t the hearing that caught our attention; it was a comment made by the Mayor of Martins Ferry.
Operators and investors are more concerned than ever about the remaining inventory of drillable locations. Who has it? Where is it? Will it be economic? The North American inventory rankings by shale play are always of interest. Enverus Intelligence Research (EIR), a subsidiary of Enverus, recently issued a report that ranks the plays by the number of economic-to-drill locations each play has left. Unfortunately, Marcellus Shale play is on the list of “losers” in this latest report. Why? A huge jump in Bidenflation — rig day rates were up 25% year-over-year in September in the Marcellus, compared to about 15% across the other plays. Also a factor is dropping productivity in the Marcellus (“productivity degradation”), particularly in northeast PA.
In January 2023, Ohio House Bill (HB) 507 became law with the signature of Gov. Mike DeWine (see 
An anti-drilling Democrat member of the Ohio House of Representatives (representing a Cleveland suburb) would love nothing more than to ban all shale drilling in his state. He has just introduced a bill requiring drillers to disclose any and all chemicals they use for any purpose when drilling a new shale well under state-owned land. State Rep. Sean Patrick Brennan, representing the 14th Ohio House District, claims House Bill (HB) 562 will “improve public safety and transparency.” Will it? Is that its real purpose?
In April, the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission upheld a regulatory order from the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) suspending operations of three wastewater injection wells located in Torch (Athens County), OH, owned by K&H Partners, a subsidiary of Tallgrass Energy (see 
Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) have been all the rage over the past year or so. In 2024 alone, Chesapeake Energy announced a $7.4 billion deal to buy Southwestern Energy (see 
The U.S. national oil and gas rig count had been in a pattern of free-falling for over a month. Last week, the national combined Baker Hughes oil and gas rig count finally reversed course and added four rigs — now at 585. The Marcellus/Utica stayed the same last week, for the fifth week in a row, with a combined 36 active rigs. Pennsylvania continued to operate 21 rigs. Ohio remained steady with ten active rigs. And West Virginia kept five active rigs.