PA Charges Mariner East Pipeline $8M+ to Fix Marsh Creek Lake
While drilling in Chester County in August 2020 in the Marsh Creek State Park area, Energy Transfer’s (ET) Mariner East 2X pipeline experienced an “inadvertent return”–nontoxic drilling mud coming up out of the ground where it’s not supposed to (see Mariner East 2X Construction Causes Another Drilling Mud Spill). In this case, an estimated 8,100 gallons of non-toxic drilling mud came up in a small section of the 535-acre Marsh Creek Lake. It was a costly episode for ET. The state has just announced a gun-to-the-head “agreement” with ET that has ET paying a $4 million fine, spending another $4 million (or more) to dredge and fix the area, and $341,000 in civil penalties for permit violations.
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The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), lapdog of leftwing Gov. Tom Wolf, tried to bypass the state legislature and secretly push through and get adopted a proposed regulation on the state joining the highly controversial Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multi-state compact to limit carbon emissions from power plant operators (a carbon tax). The DEP just got caught red-handed.
Last Thursday CNX Resources reached a plea deal with the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office over alleged violations of the Air Pollution Control Act and bad recordkeeping. Yeah, you read that right. State Attorney General Josh Shapiro (a real putz) leveled criminal charges against CNX over miscounting how many times the company used a pig (pipeline inspection gauge) to clean out a pipeline in Washington County, PA. An anti-fossil fuel zealot who lives near the pigging station complained about noise and emissions and ran squealing to the AG (pun intended).
So many lawsuits and appeals of actions have been filed against the Mariner East pipeline system (being built by Energy Transfer and its subsidiary Sunoco Logistics) we’ve lost count. Dozens? Hundreds? Who knows! We try to highlight some of them–the more important ones that have the potential to slow or stop work on the 99% done system. Here’s one not even on our radar that got completely dismissed last week: Wilmer Baker and Rolfe Blume vs. Sunoco Pipeline L.P.
The so-called Ohio River Valley Institute (ORVI) is a far-left, hyper-partisan, nonprofit organization that routinely lies about the Marcellus/Utica industry. A Pittsburgh area labor and business group called Pittsburgh Works Together (PWT) routinely debunks ORVI’s falsehoods. Here’s the latest lie from ORVI: “[T]he Shell petrochemical complex has failed to produce economic growth in Beaver County.” Here’s the truth, the facts, as shared by PWT: “In the years before the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, Beaver County grew jobs far faster than the overall Pittsburgh region, the state of Pennsylvania, and the U.S, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of labor statistics. And Beaver County’s economy expanded twice as fast as the rest of the state, and faster than the U.S. economy overall, gross domestic product (GDP) data show.”
Back in June, MDN told you about a long-running lawsuit in Tioga County, PA by landowners who claim that UGI has taken their mineral rights as part of operating the Meeker Storage Field, an underground natural gas storage facility (see 
The EQT Foundation was established in 2003 as a dedicated resource for financial, in-kind, and volunteer support to communities where EQT works and has a presence. Since its inception, the EQT Foundation has awarded more than $60 million to nonprofits throughout the operational footprint of EQT. That is an amazing number! In honor of Giving Tuesday, yesterday EQT announced the launch of two new giving programs to support the communities of Greene County, PA, and Wetzel County, WV.
It seems as if Pennsylvania has been on a yo-yo lately. Three weeks ago PA issued just two permits to drill new shale wells. Two weeks ago PA issued 15 permits! And now, for last week (Nov. 22-28), PA flipped back to just two new permits again. What’s going on? Did the DEP take most of last week off for the Thanksgiving holiday? Perhaps. Ohio pulled our region’s bacon out of the fire by issuing 11 new permits last week for Utica shale wells. West Virginia drillers got skunked with zero new permits last week. All totaled there were just 13 new permits issued last week in the M-U, down from 32 the week before.
Olympus Energy (formerly Huntley & Huntley) is expanding its drilling program in Upper Burrell, in Westmoreland County, PA, near Pittsburgh (see 
Earlier this month we shared the exciting news that Nacero Inc. will build a $6 billion refinery on the site of a former coal mine in Newport Township and Nanticoke in Luzerne County, PA (see 
The environmental radicals on the left continue their push to defeat the construction of an $800 million liquefaction plant in Wyalusing (Bradford County), PA, meant to liquefy and ship LNG to a planned facility on the Delaware River, for exporting to other countries. The left’s latest ploy? Antis are proclaiming a special permit issued during the Trump administration that allows LNG from the Wyalusing plant to be shipped via special rail cars is about to expire at the end of this month and almost certainly won’t get renewed. In addition, antis have stirred up some of the liberal locals near the port facility where the LNG would get safely loaded onto ships. It is a continuing, coordinated two-pronged attack against the project.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) latest Monthly Electric Generator Inventory, between 2022 and 2025 (the next three years) some 27.3 gigawatts (GW) of new natural gas-fired capacity is scheduled to come online in the United States. Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania–states with pipeline access to natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica shale plays–account for a combined 43% of the natural gas-fired capacity planned to come online. Yes, our molecules will feed almost half of all new gas-fired power plants!