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PA DEP Picks Pocket of Sunoco Another $497,000 for ME2 Pipe
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) is sticking its sticky fingers into the pocket of Energy Transfer/Sunoco one more time, and this time drawing out nearly half a million dollars to pay for a series of small spills of nontoxic drilling mud in Snitz Creek in Lebanon County. It isn’t the first time the DEP has fined ET for Mariner East 2 (ME2) work. We’ve lost track of how many millions of dollars ET/Sunoco has paid in various fines–some of it legit, some of it (in our opinion), not legit.
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Yesterday, CNX Resources, Bettis Brothers, and The Bus Stops Here Foundation announced a partnership intended to bring greater awareness and access to opportunities in the natural gas industry to disadvantaged urban and rural communities in the Pittsburgh region. Does the Bettis name ring any bells? It should. Pittsburgh-based IntegrServ, a trucking company partly owned by former Pittsburgh Steeler Jerome Bettis, filed a federal lawsuit last summer against EQT claiming discrimination against his company (a minority-owned company) after EQT canceled a contract worth some $66 million (see 
Yesterday Cabot Oil & Gas issued its fourth-quarter and full-year 2020 update. Cabot continues to be one of the few drillers that consistently makes a profit quarter after quarter, year after year–even during a downturns like what happened in 2020. Although down from 2019, in 2020 Cabot made just over $200 million in net income. They drilled 74 wells, completed 86 wells, and produced an average of 2.3 billion cubic feet equivalent per day (Bcfe/d) last year.
In December MDN brought you the news that the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) is proposing and seeking comments on changes to the state’s Chapter 105 (water obstructions and encroachments) permit (see 
Our headline is a bit cryptic, so we’ll explain right up front that G&P stands for gathering and processing. In pipeline giant Williams’ latest update (covering 4th quarter and full-year 2020) company reps said the Northeast G&P unit “continues to come on very strong producing record results and contributing $29 million of additional EBITDA this quarter.” They also said Northeast (namely Marcellus) gathering volumes grew by 7% in 4Q, and processing volumes grew by 9%.
You have to hand it to Pennsylvania State Sen. Gene Yaw, he sure knows how to set off the crazies in the Keystone State. Yesterday Yaw issued a fantastic op-ed saying if Gov. Wolf gets his bizarre Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) carbon tax adopted, Pennsylvanians can look forward to power outages like those recently experienced in Texas, which happened in large part because of the failure of “renewable” energy sources like windmills. Yaw’s comments have the lefties yammering away to “correct” Yaw’s non-standard and non-approved speech.
All three M-U states received permits to drill new shale wells last week. Pennsylvania received 10 new permits. Ohio received 6 new permits. And West Virginia received 3 new permits.
As we reported in January, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (Democrat) has, for the seventh year in a row, introduced a Marcellus-killing severance tax proposal as part of his annual budget proposal (see 
The official state bird for New York State is the tiny Eastern bluebird–no bigger than a chickadee. Here at MDN HQ, we maintain two bird feeders year-round in the front yard. We can remember only maybe 3-4 times over the years we’ve actually seen a bluebird at our feeders. The bluebird is one of our favorites because we see it so rarely. According to researchers at Penn State in State College, PA, loud noise from pipeline compressor stations has the ability to “diminish” the “reproductive success” of bluebirds and other songbirds. Who would even think to conduct such an experiment?
Last August we told you about the politically-motivated prosecution (by the Chester County, PA District Attorney’s office) of men connected to a security firm providing off-duty constables to protect Mariner East 2 (ME2) pipeline construction sites (see 
Pennsylvania’s Independent Regulatory Review Commission (IRRC) has just thrown up a huge roadblock to Democrat/autocrat PA Gov. Tom Wolf’s attempt to railroad through a proposal to force PA to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a $2.6 billion carbon tax aimed at killing coal and gas-fired power plants. The IRRC told the rule-adopting Environmental Quality Board (EQB) it should delay adoption of the proposed RGGI regulation by one year, from 2022 to 2023.
Yesterday the country’s largest natural gas producer, EQT Corporation, released its 4Q and full-year 2020 update, holding a conference call with analysts to discuss the results. The update shows the company produced an average of 4.45 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of natural gas in 4Q. Although there was plenty of “free cash flow” for the year, on paper the company lost $967 million in 2020, which is an improvement over the year before when it lost $1.2 billion. Perhaps the biggest news (for us) coming from yesterday’s update is that in 4Q EQT turned its drilling attention to the West Virginia Marcellus. EQT plans to do much more drilling in WV this year too.
We hate it when the bad guys win even a small victory, as has just happened. We told you last week about a group of radicalized anti-fossil fuelers who raised a stink with the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Proteciton (DEP) over the DEP’s routine, nothing-to-see-here renewal of permits for already-running (with no operational problems) shale wastewater recycling facilities scattered around the state (see 
Here’s a small victory to celebrate. In July 2018 three radical environmental groups dropped their objections to permits the DEP previously granted for the Mariner East 2 Pipeline. Clean Air Council, Mountain Watershed Association, and THE Delaware Riverkeeper “settled” their appeal of 20 permits issued to Sunoco for the ME2 project (see