Allegheny County Bill to Ban Fracking Under Parks Going Nowhere
Since 2013 anti-fossil fuel zealots–people with an irrational hatred of fossil fuels–have tried to ban drilling under (not on) public parks in Allegheny County, PA (near Pittsburgh). A small group of 100 radicals gathered outside the City-County building in downtown Pittsburgh last week to throw a collective temper tantrum, demanding Allegheny County Council ban any new drilling under county-owned parks (see Loudmouths Pressure Allegheny County to Ban Fracking UNDER Parks). According to comments by County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, a new bill to ban fracking under parks will have zero chance of being adopted since he will veto it and there isn’t a veto-proof majority on County Council to override his veto.
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Since 2013 anti-fossil fuel zealots–people with an irrational hatred of fossil fuels–have tried to ban drilling under (not on) public parks in Allegheny County, PA (near Pittsburgh). A small group of perhaps 100 radicals gathered outside the City-County building in downtown Pittsburgh last night to throw a collective temper tantrum, demanding Allegheny County Council ban any new drilling under (not on) county-owned parks.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” (Quote attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the head of Nazi Germany’s Ministry of Propaganda) The left so often adopts the attitude if you keep repeating the same lie over and over–preferably the bigger the lie the better–the lie will become accepted as the truth. State Sen. Katie Muth, D-Montgomery, chair of the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Policy Committee, and Sen. Jim Brewster, D-Allegheny, are expert practitioners of this strategy with respect to lying about the Marcellus Shale and fracking. They were at it again last week holding a public (i.e. propaganda) hearing at the Community College of Allegheny County.
Engineers at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering are developing a new way to reduce the environmental impact of drilling and fracking by cleaning produced water for reuse. Produced water is the water that comes out of the hole long after drilling and fracking is done. It is “water from the depths”–far below the water table–and it’s full of minerals, which is why it’s often called brine (or salt). Pitt engineers have researched membrane distillation (MD) to treat this salty wastewater. Pitt has discovered how to use MD to economically recycle and reuse produced water from shale.
In early 2013 the Pittsburgh International Airport and Allegheny County, PA signed a deal with CONSOL Energy (now CNX Resources) to lease 9,000 acres surrounding the airport for natural gas drilling (see 
Olympus Energy (formerly Huntley & Huntley) drills in the Greater Pittsburgh region, in Allegheny and Westmoreland counties. Last year Olympus filed an application to build a new well pad in a rural part of Allegheny County, in West Deer Township. So-called “concerned citizens” got amped up to oppose the project. They succeeded when the Dionysus well pad was rejected by town supervisors (see 
Last week Pennsylvania issued 16 new shale well permits. EQT led the way with ten permits, all of them for wells in Greene County. You just HAVE to read the names of the wells (below). After getting skunked for two weeks in a row, Ohio finally issued permits once again last week–ten of them. Ascent Resources scored six permits, mostly in Belmont County. Encino Energy had four permits, all in Carroll County. Finally, West Virginia had nine permits. Antero Resources scored seven of the nine (six in Wetzel County), and Southwestern took the remaining two permits (both in Marshall County).
GAI Consultants, headquartered in Pittsburgh, is a planning, engineering & environmental consulting firm serving clients in the energy, transportation, development, government, and industrial markets. GAI has been in business since 1958 and has served the oil and gas industry since the early 1980s. The shale industry was a big boom for GAI’s business. Shale is helping GAI to grow again–exponentially. GAI announced last Friday the company has expanded further into the oil and gas industry with the acquisition of PGH Petroleum & Environmental Engineers LLC, headquartered in Austin, Texas.
Plum Boro (Allegheny County, PA) officials and environmental leftist groups (backed by Big Green foreign money) are gearing up to oppose Plum’s second wastewater injection well with smears and lies. A long-fought-over wastewater injection well in Plum finally opened for business in mid-2021, having overcome all sorts of smears and slanders and lawsuits by the enviro-left (see 
In early 2013 the Pittsburgh International Airport and Allegheny County, PA signed a deal with CONSOL Energy (now CNX Resources) to lease 9,000 acres surrounding the airport for natural gas drilling (see 
Penn State has launched a new research project to see if it can prove there is a link between water contamination in southwestern Pennsylvania and fracking. We’ve seen this movie before…or have we? In 2018 PA Gov. Tom Wolf, a liberal Democrat who sometimes supports the shale gas industry (as long as he can tax it) caved to demands from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to launch a “study” in a bid to “prove” cases of rare childhood cancer in southwestern PA can be tied to shale drilling in the region (see 
Last week 24 permits were issued to drill new shale wells in the Marcellus/Utica. Pennsylvania had the lion’s share with 19 new permits–most of those (10) were issued for two Chesapeake Energy well pads in Bradford County in the northeastern part of the state. Ohio had just two new permits, both on the same Southwestern Energy well pad in Monroe County. West Virginia had three new permits, one in Pleasants County and two in Marshall County.
Olympus Energy (formerly Huntley & Huntley) drills in the Greater Pittsburgh region, in Allegheny and Westmoreland counties. In 2021 Olympus filed an application to build a new well pad in a rural part of Allegheny County, in West Deer Township. So-called “concerned citizens” got amped up to oppose the project (see