PA DEP Nixes Previously Permitted Wastewater Injection Well
The PA Dept. of Environmental Protection under Acting Sec. John Quigley (formerly from the anti-drilling organization PennFuture) has reversed a decision made by the DEP just last October to permit a rare/new wastewater injection well in Indiana County. Most Pennsylvania wastewater that gets injected travels out of state–to either Ohio or West Virginia–for disposal in their injection wells. It would be nice if PA handled a little more of its own wastewater. The DEP under previous Gov. Tom Corbett fully vetted a well Pennsylvania General Energy (PGE) planned to use as an injection well in Grant Township. The DEP issued a permit for the well. Now they’ve welshed on their decision and rescinded the permit they issued last October. The only thing that seems to have changed in the past five months is leadership at the top of the DEP. Ergo, Quigley didn’t want this injection well…
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In one of the biggest (perhaps the biggest) fines levied by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), Halliburton has been fined $1.8 million for storing and treating hydrochloric acid (HCl) at a facility in Homer City, PA (about 50 miles from Pittsburgh). The HCl shipped and treated at the Homer City site happened over a 13-year period of time from 1999-2011, meaning most of it came from conventional natural gas well sites, although some it likely came from Marcellus Shale sites too (the conventional/unconventional split is not identified in the DEP paperwork). Marcellus drilling in PA didn’t ramp up until around 2006-2007. The DEP says Halliburton had claimed exemption from the state’s Solid Waste Management Act of 1980 for their Homer City facility, saying they were shipping and storing very small amounts of HCl at the facility when in fact that was not the case. Based on their false claim, Halliburton was given a pass on inspections, paperwork filing, signage, and the requirement to use certified hazardous waste haulers on more than 250 truck trips in and out of the facility–hauling HCl. Halliburton was in the wrong, they now acknowledge it (having been caught), and they’ve been levied a steep fine.
Those crazy, anti-drilling kids at Duke University are at it again. They released a “study” in a “peer-reviewed” journal yesterday (a study funded in part by the anti-drilling Park Foundation) that took samples from a creek downstream from a wastewater treatment plant that 
In March 2010, CONSOL Energy (Cecil, PA) paid Dominion Resources $3.5 billion for 500,000 acres of Marcellus Shale gas leases, instantly tripling their lease holdings. Since that time, CONSOL has continued to invest in Marcellus acreage and they now have 750,000 acres under lease. But CONSOL had a problem: Not enough money to develop their vast Marcellus acreage. So they did what is now a common practice—they found a partner to invest. Yesterday, CONSOL and Noble Energy (Houston, TX) announced that Noble will buy a 50 percent interest in 663,350 net undeveloped acres and fund drilling and completion costs in a deal worth $3.4 billion over an eight-year period.