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SRBC Approved 50 (!) Shale Gas Well Pad Water Use Permits in Feb.
The highly functional and responsible Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), unlike its completely dysfunctional and irresponsible cousin, the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), continues to support the shale energy industry by approving water withdrawals and consumptive use for responsible and safe shale drilling. The SRBC published a notice in the March 29 Pennsylvania Bulletin that the Executive Director of the SRBC gave his approval to or renewed 50 (!) general water use permits in February for individual shale gas well drilling pads in Bradford, Centre, Clearfield, Clinton, Lycoming, Potter, Susquehanna, and Tioga counties in Pennsylvania. Read More “SRBC Approved 50 (!) Shale Gas Well Pad Water Use Permits in Feb.”
Pine Run Gathering LLC, a joint venture owned by Stonehenge Energy and UGI, announced yesterday that it had completed a transaction to buy Superior Midstream Appalachian, LLC, for $120 million. Superior Appalachian owns and operates three gathering systems in Pennsylvania, namely Pittsburgh Mills (Allegheny & Butler counties), Snow Shoe (Centre County), and Brookfield (Tioga County). The Pittsburgh Mills system is connected to UGI’s Big Pine gathering system. All three have a combined daily flow of approximately 190 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d). 
The highly functional and responsible Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), unlike its completely dysfunctional and irresponsible cousin, the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), continues to support the shale energy industry by approving water withdrawals and consumptive use for responsible and safe shale drilling. The SRBC published a notice in the January 25 Pennsylvania Bulletin that the Executive Director of the SRBC gave his approval to or renewed 18 general water use permits in December for individual shale gas well drilling pads in Bradford, Cameron, Centre, Clearfield, Lycoming, Susquehanna, and Tioga counties. 
It’s always a red-letter day here at MDN HQ when we happen across a new pipeline project in the Marcellus/Utica region. Today is one of those days! Eastern Gas Transmission and Storage, a subsidiary of billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy (BHE), filed a new project with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in December to beef up three existing compressor stations in Centre County, Clinton County, and Franklin County in Pennsylvania, and one existing compressor station in Loudoun County, Virginia, with the aim of flowing more Marcellus molecules to the Washington, D.C. area. 
For the week of Dec 2 – 8, permits issued in the Marcellus/Utica bounced back nicely. There were 28 new permits issued last week, more than doubling the 12 issued the week before (and matching the 28 issued three weeks ago). The Keystone State (PA) issued 18 new permits, with eight going to EQT spread across three counties: Jefferson, Lycoming, and Washington. Chesapeake Energy (now Expand Energy) received four permits, all of them in northeastern PA’s Wyoming County. CNX Resource scooped up two permits, both in Westmoreland County. The final four permits were singles issued to Blackhill Energy (Bradford County), XPR Resources (Centre County), Inflection Energy (Lycoming County), and Olympus Energy (Allegheny County). 
Glenn O. Hawbaker, Inc.
Every now and again, we come across someone who is willing to risk their career by openly admitting the truth. This time that brave soul is Russell Johns, the George E. Trimble Chair in Energy and Mineral Sciences at the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State University. In a letter to the editor published in the student-run Penn State Daily Collegian, Johns points out that when considering the intense mining operations needed to harvest materials used in solar and wind technology, and the shipping associated with those materials, etc., solar and wind actually have a *bigger* carbon dioxide footprint than does using natural gas. In other words, natural gas is greener than wind and solar!
Last week Pennsylvania issued 15 new permits for shale well drilling, up nicely from the prior week of just 2 new permits. Ohio issued 9 new permits last week, and West Virginia issued 8 new permits. All totaled, the M-U saw 32 new permits issued last week, the most we’ve seen in a single week for some time. More drilling on the way!
We don’t write much about Alta Resources, a shale drilling company co-founded by the inventor of shale fracking, George Mitchell. But that doesn’t mean Alta doesn’t drill in the Marcellus. The company owns some 547,000 gross (239,000 net) acres producing natural gas from approximately 900 wells in the Marcellus Shale across Bradford, Wyoming, Sullivan, Lycoming, Clinton, and Centre counties in northeast Pennsylvania. Alta is shopping all of their considerable Marcellus assets, looking for a buyer.
We don’t often see news about a Marcellus producer called Alta Resources. Alta was one of the first drillers we wrote about just after launching the MDN website back in 2009 (see 
Last November MDN told you that Northeast Natural Energy, a small-to-midsized driller headquartered in Morgantown, WV, had lost an arbitration battle and owed a group of landowners in central Pennsylvania $7.9 million in payments for NOT drilling on their land (see 
Pennsylvania’s Pipeline Investment Program (or PIPE) grants cover part of the cost of building new natgas pipelines to connect homes and businesses in rural parts of the state to homegrown Marcellus Shale gas supplies. We’ve written about many of the more-than-a-dozen (so far) PIPE grant projects in the past (