Energy Companies | EQT Corp | Greene County (PA) | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Regulation | Rice Energy
DEP Clips Rice (EQT) $147,250 for Polluting Rain Gardens in SWPA
We’ve heard of vegetable gardens. We’ve heard of flower gardens. We’ve heard of rose gardens. Remember the Lynn Anderson song, “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden”? We’ve also heard of rock gardens, raised gardens, herb gardens, and indoor gardens. One garden we hadn’t heard about until today is a “rain garden.” Ever heard that term? Rice Energy (now part of EQT Corporation) is paying a big fine, $147,250, for work done at a well site in Greene County, PA, in 2019 that allowed erosion and soil to contaminate not one but three rain gardens. I beg your pardon!
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What if we gave the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) a $2.5 million grant to study a link between peanut butter and childhood cancer? Researchers could only use the money to study any potential link between peanut butter and kids getting rare cancers. Sounds absurd, right? What if there is NO link between peanut butter and cancer in kids? What if there IS a link to some other environmental factor like, say, an old uranium dumpsite nearby? But the remit is to ONLY research peanut butter. Sound silly? Sound stupid? Substitute “shale drilling” for “peanut butter,” and you can see how absurd it is for Pitt to study a single potential cause for rare childhood cancers in southwestern PA. Yet they are. Pitt is studying a link solely between fracking and cancer in kids. They are now trying to recruit local families to participate in this sham they call science.
Last week the three states with active Marcellus/Utica drilling, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, issued a collective 19 new drilling permits, down from 30 the week before. The top receiver of permits in PA was EQT (i.e. Rice Drilling), with five permits issued for the same well pad in Greene County. Range Resources and Inflection Energy each received two new permits.
The same old issue keeps returning in Pennsylvania for landowners and rights owners. The Pennsylvania Minimum Royalty Act guarantees payments to all rights owners of at least 12.5% of the value of the produced gas. Yet contracts signed by many landowners allow for post-production deductions, and those deductions sometimes (often?) result in landowners receiving less than 12.5% in royalty payments. This issue has been a thorn of contention between landowners and drillers for years–two groups that are normally allies. Farmers/landowners from several western PA counties gathered yesterday at the Washington County Farm Bureau’s annual legislative meeting to discuss, among other issues, minimum royalties.
In early 2018, the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) collected a whopping $1.7 million fine from Energy Corporation of America (ECA) for violations at 17 well sites in Cumberland, Jefferson, and Whiteley Townships in Greene County, and Goshen Township in Clearfield County (see 
EQT CEO Toby Rice is and has been on a mission–to spread the gospel of LNG (see