Crime | Electrical Generation | Energy Services | FirstEnergy | Industrywide Issues | Ohio | Statewide OH
Generation Now Pleads Guilty in $61M FirstEnergy OH Nuke Scandal
On Friday, representatives of a “dark money” political action committee called Generation Now signed a guilty plea admitting their part in the biggest bribery scandal to ever hit Ohio. Generation Now was set up as a social welfare nonprofit but in reality was a shell organization that received “tens of millions of dollars” from FirstEnergy as part of a $61 million bribery scandal to pass and keep passed House Bill (HB) 6 which funnels over $1 billion from Ohio ratepayers to FirstEnergy in order to keep the company’s unprofitable nuclear power plants running.
Read More “Generation Now Pleads Guilty in $61M FirstEnergy OH Nuke Scandal”
On Joe Biden’s first day in occupying the White House, he signed an Executive Order (EO) suspending new oil and gas leasing while the Interior Department reviews existing leases and permitting practices for 60 days. The aim is to make the federal lease ban permanent. However, some permits on existing leases will continue to be issued during the 60-day review period. You may think Biden’s federal lease ban does not affect the Marcellus/Utica region. You would be wrong.
All three M-U states received permits to drill new shale wells last week. Pennsylvania received 22 new permits. Ohio received 2 new permits. And West Virginia received 8 new permits.
In 2016 a group of business and government leaders from Ohio and West Virginia in the Mid-Ohio Valley banded together to form an economic development group called Shale Crescent USA, or SCUSA (see 
Diversified Gas & Oil (DGO) owns close to 8 million acres of leases with some 60,000 (mostly) conventional oil and gas wells. Their focus has been to acquire quality production and cash flow–regardless of the well or commodity type (gas or oil)–in the Appalachian Basin. DGO currently owns over 400 Marcellus/Utica shale wells in their portfolio too. The company just added to their inventory of shale wells, closing on the purchase of five Utica Shale wells in Monroe County, OH. The purchase price for all five? $8.4 million.
Here’s an interesting twist. Just last week we told you about ongoing opposition from anti-fossil fuelers to a currently dormant project, the Mountaineer NGL Storage hub project in Monroe County, OH (see 
Last fall Mountaineer NGL Storage, a $500 million project in Monroe County to build underground storage for ethane and other NGLs, asked Ohio to cancel a key permit for the project (see 
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost continues to hammer FirstEnergy Corporation. In November Yost filed a lawsuit to block the collection of $150 million provided for under House Bill (HB) 6, aimed at propping up FirstEnergy’s unprofitable nuclear power plants in the state (see 
The Enverus U.S. oil and gas rig count slipped by one to 406 over the past week. The Marcellus play stayed even with 32 active rigs. However, in a good sign, the Ohio Utica picked up 2 new rigs to close the week with 8 active rigs (total of 40 active rigs in the M-U).