Departing PA DEP Attacks Conventional O&G in So-Called Report
Last July, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, controlled by the extreme left in the Democrat Party, allowed PA House Bill (HB) 2644 to become law without his signature (see New PA Act 96 Helps Boost Plugging Orphan Wells – Left Goes Nuts). Wolf took a big hit from those in his own party following his inaction on 2644. He tried to make up for it by publishing a notice in the Pennsylvania Bulletin to justify his action of allowing 2644 to become law (now called Act 96) by instructing the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) to conduct a comprehensive review of conventional oil and gas driller compliance (see PA Gov. Wolf Instructs DEP to Draft New Regs Following Act 96). The DEP issued its report on Dec. 29th (it was due on Sept. 1), just as the upper echelon of the DEP is heading for the door to make way for Shapiro’s crazy squad to take over. The report the DEP issued was essentially a hit piece against the conventional oil and gas industry in the state.
1/5/23 UPDATE: See below for a comment added by PIOGA.
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Last Thursday, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) published its 2021 Oil and Gas Annual Report (about five months late). This is the sixth year in a row the DEP has published the report in an interactive, electronic (i.e. online only) format. Don’t worry, we’ve turned the report into a convenient PDF for MDN readers. What does the 2021 report show? Permits issued went down, but the number of new wells drilled went up. Natural gas production has gone up (again)–to another new all-time record high.
The best gifts we give to each other during this holiday season are intangible: Time spent with family and friends, a kind word, attending a church service. But hey, toys and gadgets and gear are a close second! 🙂 Have you ever stopped to ponder what Christmas morning without fossil energy would look like? We’ll tell you what it would look like–men and women wearing animal skins sitting around a wood or dung fire in a cave. There would be no gifts. Just about every (physical, tangible) gift you either give or get this holiday season will have plastic as part of it, and plastic comes from oil and gas. No fossil fuels, no gifts. The Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association (PIOGA) has put together a holiday gift guide to remind you of the importance of oil and gas this holiday season.
Last week (Dec. 12-18), the number of permits issued to drill new shale wells in the Marcellus/Utica bumped up nicely to 32, up from the prior week’s 20. Both Pennsylvania and Ohio issued 16 new shale permits each. West Virginia got skunked and issued none.
Kevin Sunday, director of government affairs with the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry, recently published an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette pointing out how the mighty Shell ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, PA, is the result of business and government (bipartisan government) working together. He makes the case that we need more of this type of thing, especially with many new faces coming to Harrisburg in January. We frankly wonder if hoping for bipartisan cooperation on fossil energy projects in the current political climate is just spitting in the wind.
It took us a while to track down this story, but we finally have details about the settlement of a class action lawsuit brought by roughly 60 landowners in Fayette County, PA, against Chief Exploration and Development, the former drilling arm of Chief Oil & Gas (now called Cyprus Exploration and Development). The lawsuit alleged that in 2008, Chief and its landman had cut a deal to lease the landowners’ property and then never paid the stipulated signing bonus. The lawsuit sought $7 million. The landowners ended up settling for $5.5 million earlier this month.
Unlike the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), which gets the creepy crawlies at the mere mention of the word “fracking,” the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) has been dealing with fracking and water requests for use in fracking for more than a decade. Somehow the SRBC, a quasi-governmental agency (as is the DRBC), manages to allow fracking, and there are NO negative impacts on local water and NO negative impact on the Susquehanna River and its tributaries. Must be the people who run the SRBC are just more talented than those who run the DRBC.
Earlier this week, MDN told you that the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) announced a consent order assessing a $600,000 fine against a trucking company that hauled drill cuttings from West Virginia to PA and dumped them (without a permit) at several sites owned by the trucking company (see 
Industrial Energy Consumers of America (IECA), a trade group representing some of the biggest consumers of energy in the U.S. (i.e., manufacturers), wrote a letter to the governors of 12 states along the Eastern Seaboard asking those governors to prioritize natural gas pipelines in their respective states (full copy of the letter below). Recipients included Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and (falling on deaf ears) New York and New Jersey. According to the letter, manufacturing companies along the East Coast face growing natural gas scarcity due to the lack of interstate natural gas pipeline capacity.
In August, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro (a confirmed shale energy hater who becomes Governor on Jan. 1), announced that he had finally bullied Energy Transfer into pleading “no contest” (meaning they don’t admit to a darned thing) in a so-called criminal case against the company for a series of accidents affecting construction for both the Revolution and Mariner East pipelines (see 
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) announced a consent order assessing a $600,000 fine against a trucking company that hauled drill cuttings from West Virginia and dumped them (without a permit) at several sites owned by the trucking company in Fayette County, PA. The unsanctioned dumping happened between the years 2012 and 2015.