Shell PA Cracker Neighbors Ask About Orange Glow and White Foam
The mighty Shell ethane cracker complex in Monaca (Beaver County), PA, is due to come online any day now. In fact, with such a large and complex facility, it is already “coming online” gradually and has been since August (see Shell CEO Says PA Cracker Now Done, Gradually Coming Online). The truly momentous event will be when the first plastic pellets come out of the plant. Shell held a virtual meeting Wednesday evening to field questions from the community as the day draws near when the plant is fully operational. One of the questions came from neighbors observing an orange glow hovering over the plant. Another question was about “white foam” floating near the facility on the Ohio River.
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Epsilon Energy, one of the smaller Marcellus drillers that we track, issued an update this week to say the company has issued a dividend and has repurchased shares of the company’s stock in an effort to reward and increase value to investors. Epsilon also reports a new well in which they own a share recently came online to sales in Susquehanna County, PA.
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.
In June, seemingly out of nowhere, a plan to build an LNG export facility on the banks of the Delaware River south of Philadelphia made big headlines in Philly. Penn LNG, headed by Franc James, a native of Philadelphia, has “quietly lined up support to build a $6.4 billion liquefied natural gas export terminal near Philly.” While acknowledging such a project will face stiff opposition, James is planning to pre-file with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) by the end of this year, and reach a final investment decision (FID) by 2024. Full speed ahead!
We experienced déjà vu as we read about a hearing held Tuesday evening in Plum Boro (Allegheny County, PA) about a proposed shale wastewater injection well. Some 20 people made their way to the microphones to voice their objections to plans by Penneco Environmental Solutions to site a second injection well in the boro–right next to an existing injection well. We’ve heard it all before, almost four years ago, when some of the same people objected to Penneco’s plans to install the first injection well (see 
Get a Democrat nurse to repeat the talking points from two far-left, lying Democrat groups (the Conservation Voters of PA and the NRDC) bashing the Republican candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, in a TV commercial, and it’s just another regurgitate-the-lies story from lamestream media. This time the lies are that Doug Mastriano loves to pollute–because he stands up for the Marcellus shale industry in the state. We hope PA residents (and U.S. residents across the country) are beginning to see through the lies spread by the Democrat left. The left can’t argue and debate the facts, so they resort to name-calling and lies. The good news is that the left is spending money on this kind of thing, meaning they don’t believe that hardened anti-driller Josh Shapiro (Democrat, currently Attorney General) has the race for governor locked up–as all the “polls” quoted by lamestream media indicate.
In May 2021, the radicals from PennFuture, the Philadelphia-based Clean Air Council, and the so-called Center for Biological Diversity (better named the Center for Leftwing Conformity) challenged an air permit issued by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) for the Renovo Energy Center, a Marcellus-fired power plant in Clinton County (northcentral), PA (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” (anti-fossil fuel zealots) got amped up to oppose the rural project (see 
In March, MDN told you that the Deputy Chief Administrative Law Judge of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) issued a ruling against the now completed Mariner East 2 pipeline project, assessing a $51,000 fine on the project for work done near an apartment complex (see 
Apparently, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf told a fib on Feb. 1 of this year when he said PA had received an initial $25 million cash infusion from the federal government’s new (so-called) infrastructure law for use in plugging orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells (see 
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 January 2020, the retirement systems for public employees of various municipalities, including the Allegheny County (PA) Employees’ Retirement System, filed a lawsuit against Energy Transfer and subsidiary Sunoco Logistics alleging top management made false and misleading statements about the construction of three Mariner East 2 and the Revolution natural gas pipeline projects in Pennsylvania. The lawsuit alleges because of those statements, the share price of their stock fell, and investors lost a boatload of money. In April 2021, the lawsuit survived a motion to dismiss by Energy Transfer (see 
If you live in Pennsylvania and listen to (or read) the media at all, you have likely heard about Senate Bill 106. The “short title” for the bill is this: “A Joint Resolution proposing separate and distinct amendments to the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, providing that there is no constitutional right to taxpayer-funded abortion or other right relating to abortion; further providing for action on concurrent orders and resolutions, for Lieutenant Governor and for qualifications of electors; and providing for election audits.” Yeah, not so short. The bill is aimed at amending the PA Constitution to cover several important issues.