73% of Pennsylvanians Want NatGas to Remain Part of State Energy Mix
Pennsylvania is the second-largest producer of natural gas in the country. A new poll from Pittsburgh Works Together, a coalition of business and labor groups in Western PA, says Pennsylvanians want to keep PA at the top of the natural gas heap. A poll conducted of 600 PA voters in February finds 73% strongly or somewhat supported the idea that Pennsylvania should ensure that natural gas remains a part of the state’s energy use. That is an overwhelming majority of PA citizens who think natural gas (and natural gas drilling) should continue in the Keystone State.
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The Pennsylvania House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, chaired by State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (Republican from Butler County) is scheduled to hold a meeting on Monday, March 28 to consider two proposed bills. One is a bill that would give the legislature authority to participate in any decision about adopting the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) carbon tax scheme. The other bill is a resolution that would be sent to the leftist governors of New York and New Jersey asking them to allow new pipelines to be built into and through their states, to flow more fracked PA gas.
Bitcoin “mining” is a rapidly expanding new customer for natural gas across the country, including in Pennsylvania. Gigantic computer server farms run complex mathematical computations and the result of those computations is a blockchain. When a blockchain is formed, the server farm doing the computations gets compensated with bitcoins, a form of digital money. Bitcoin (the generic term is cryptocurrency) mining uses huge amounts of electricity to run all of those computers. That’s where natural gas comes in. In PA the state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) has applied different standards to different requests from bitcoin miners to set up shop. A new bill aims to fix the problem of inconsistent treatment of these requests.
Coterra Energy (formerly Cabot Oil & Gas) remains one of our favorite Marcellus/Utica drillers. We personally know some of the great people who work there. We’ll never forget having a private tour of a drill site in Susquehanna County, PA by Coterra’s chief Marcellus driller, Buddy Wylie. During the tour, Buddy waxed eloquent on mud logging, showing us rock chips under a microscope. Seeing a drilling operation up close, understanding how wells are planned a year or more in advance, coordinating all of the logistics (when the sand needs to arrive, pipe inventory, trucks to move equipment, backhoes to get the pad ready, etc.) it dawned on us, this stuff really is rocket science! The smart folks at Coterra have done it again–more rocket science. This time they’ve developed a new method for predicting natural gas and oil reservoirs.
We’re back to covering just a single week of new permits issued. The good news is that the PA DEP’s reporting site was still up and online over the past week, so we have numbers! In Pennsylvania, 11 new permits were issued last week, with Coterra Energy (formerly Cabot Oil & Gas) getting the lion’s share (nine permits), all of them in Susquehanna County on two well pads. Ohio issued seven new permits last week, with Gulfport Energy scoring four of the seven, all on the same pad. West Virginia issued just two new permits, one to Antero Resources and the other to Tug Hill Operating.
It’s always a sad day when radical Big Green groups win a victory over American energy. Such has happened with the New Fortress Energy (NFE) LNG plant proposed for Wyalusing in Bradford County, PA. Three Big Green groups challenged an extension for a permit previously issued for a new liquefaction facility proposed by NFE located in northeastern PA. NFE has caved and agreed that should it proceed with the project, it will need to file all over again and get a new permit–which doesn’t look likely.
One year ago, in March 2021, Eureka Resources announced plans to build a Marcellus Shale wastewater treatment facility in Dimock (Susquehanna County), Pennsylvania (see 
Since the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine, we’ve read a number of articles about how American energy can reduce the impact of Putin’s war by supplying Europe with oil and natural gas. However, one such article appearing on Fox Business stands above all the rest. It’s well written and makes a strong case that Pennsylvania, specifically, has a critical role to play in helping to defeat Putin’s war on Ukraine. That role is ramping up Marcellus Shale gas production.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, refineries in the Greater Philly area are among the biggest importers of Russian crude oil in the U.S. President Biden recently slapped a ban on imports of Russian crude oil. So what happens to the Philly refineries that use it? Where will they get their oil from to keep operating?
MDN friend Mark Caskey, president and founder of Steel Nation, a company that builds steel buildings used for natural gas compressor and transmission stations, penned an op-ed for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review to respond to lies being published by the leftist group Earthworks. On March 8 a paid anti-fossil fuel “petrochemicals campaigner” published a column in the Tribune-Review regurgitating Big Green lies that fossil fuels are evil and that calls by PA shale drillers to increase domestic energy output is somehow bad. The answer for lefties is always the same–renewable nirvana will ride in to save the day. (See our post today about fossil energy providing 4X more of our energy than renewables from now until 2050 and beyond–according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.)
It’s been fun watching the enviro-left soil themselves over the sudden and dramatic shift in public favorable attitudes toward fossil energy. There is no disputing that if the U.S. was energy independent, as it was under Donald Trump, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine would not be having the impact on oil and gas prices that it has had. Republicans (even a few Democrats) are loudly proclaiming we need to ramp up American oil and natural gas drilling once again. This has the lefties doing all sorts of mental gymnastics to try and explain how increasing oil and gas drilling here would be a bad thing. It’s actually quite funny!
