PA Repubs Ask Tone-Deaf Gov. Wolf to Unleash State’s Gas Reserves
Last week saw a flurry of sniping back and forth between Pennsylvania House Republicans and Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf over the issue of whether Wolf should be doing more to promote PA natural gas production as a solution to help Europe out of its current pickle with Vlad Putin. Russia keeps jerking Europe’s chain by slowing and even stopping natural gas flows to the Continent in retaliation for Europe engaging in sanctions against Russia over its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Apparently, the House Republicans got under Wolf’s skin, as he retorted with some rather testy language of his own.
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An interesting conversation was held on Tuesday during the Pennsylvania Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on the budget for PA in 2022. Secretary of the Dept. of Conservation & Natural Resources (DCNR) Cindy Dunn was there to talk about her agency’s financial needs in the coming year. Also there was PA Sen. Gene Yaw and PA Sen. Joe Pittman, both Republicans. Yaw and Pittman asked Dunn why her agency doesn’t lease another 22,000 acres of state land for natural gas drilling as a form of “self help” to help fund DCNR’s budget. Great question…
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia are all scrambling to form working groups or other alliances in an attempt to be THE state chosen for one of four regional hydrogen hubs funded by the recently passed so-called Biden infrastructure bill. The new law provides $8 billion for four regional hubs. It’s a safe bet one of those hubs will be located in either PA, OH, or WV. The race is now on to attract that investment money. On Friday, WV’s new Hydrogen Hub Working Group held its first meeting to plot a strategy to snag the project. However, PA and OH are in the hunt too, with their own dedicated groups.
Using investment capital from Preferred Capital Securities, WhiteHawk Energy is buying mineral and royalty rights in southwestern Pennsylvania, primarily in Washington and Green counties, for $52.5 million. The assets include production and cash flow from over 950 horizontal Marcellus Shale wells. The wells are operated by EQT, CNX Resources, and Range Resources.
Two Pennsylvania Senators, Gene Yaw (Lycoming County) and John Yudichak (Luzerne County) have sent a letter to the state’s Independent Fiscal Office (IFO) asking the IFO to audit the modeling done by the inept Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) with respect to the price of credits being sold under the RGGI carbon tax scheme. PA Gov. Wolf intends to force the state, against the will of the people (i.e. the legislature that represents the people) to join RGGI, which slaps in insanely high carbon tax on all coal- and Marcellus gas-fired power plants. Yaw and Yudichak believe the DEP fudged the numbers with their original estimates of how much so-called RGGI credits cost. The senators want a neutral, independent third party to analyze the analysis done by the DEP.
In May 2017, Murrysville Township (Westmoreland County) struck a zoning compromise with local drillers on the distance of setbacks (see 
In late October Nacero announced a $6 billion gas-to-liquids (GTL) refinery, to be built on the site of a former coal mine in Newport Township and Nanticoke in Luzerne County, PA (see 
Gene Barr, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry, unloaded on Joe Biden and his inept energy policies in a recent op-ed in which Barr says it’s time for U.S. energy policy to stop empowering Russia. In addition to more oil drilling and oil pipelines, Barr advocates for more natural gas drilling and more natural gas pipelines here in the Marcellus/Utica. Do you want to help Europe? Stop blocking American oil and gas, President Biden!
The Washington County, PA Chamber of Commerce held its State of The Economy event yesterday. One of the speakers, Denise Brinley (former executive director of Pennsylvania’s Office of Energy) said that southwestern Pennsylvania and the Pittsburgh region is a prime prospect to take advantage of establishing a $2 billion hydrogen hub. Western PA is in the “bullseye” of why funding was included in the recent federal infrastructure bill to establish four such hubs nationally, according to Brinley.
Penn State has launched a new research project to see if it can prove there is a link between water contamination in southwestern Pennsylvania and fracking. We’ve seen this movie before…or have we? In 2018 PA Gov. Tom Wolf, a liberal Democrat who sometimes supports the shale gas industry (as long as he can tax it) caved to demands from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to launch a “study” in a bid to “prove” cases of rare childhood cancer in southwestern PA can be tied to shale drilling in the region (see 
The wild roller coaster continues of up, down, up, down, up, down. Last week the number of permits issued to drill new shale wells is down again–to 18 total. Pennsylvania had 16 new permits last week, nine for Repsol and three for Coterra Energy. All of Repsol and Coterra’s permits issued for Susquehanna County. West Virginia had two new permits, one each for Southwestern Energy and Antero Resources, in Marshall and Doddridge counties. Ohio? A big, fat, goose egg. No new shale permits issued last week in the Buckeye State.
Olympus Energy (formerly Huntley & Huntley), which drills in southwestern Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh, has just entered into a contract with U.S. Well Services (USWS) to provide the company with electric fracking. The deal calls for USWS to provide electric fracking to Olympus for 2022 with a potential contract extension until 2024. What is electric fracking?