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Weekly Shale Drilling Permits for PA, OH, WV: Nov. 23-27
Last week Pennsylvania issued 12 new shale well drilling permits with a mix of permits issued in both the southwest (wet gas) and northeast (dry gas) regions of the state. Ohio issued 7 new permits, all of them except one in the same county (Jefferson). West Virginia was a goose egg–no new permits issued last week.
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Here’s a first! Pennsylvania has (so far) issued 36 permits for frack wastewater injection wells. Every single one of those wells is located in the western part of the state. A frack wastewater company headquartered in Susquehanna County, PA (in the northeastern part of the state) is “exploring the possibility” of building an injection well in (no lie) Dimock! We love it!
Sunoco Pipeline is beginning construction work this week on some of the final bits of the Mariner East 2 pipeline project in Delaware County. One of the projects is to install the pipeline through the Glen Riddle Station Apartment complex. The owner and tenants are not happy. They should have known this day would come.
Mainstream media is spinning the story of a Cumberland County, PA man who doesn’t feel safe living 1,000 feet away from the Mariner East pipeline into a David and Goliath cliche. The man won a small victory from a left-leaning, Sunoco-hating administrative law judge last December (see 
A truly bipartisan bill ensuring only those people in Pennsylvania who actually need pipeline safety information have access to it was signed into law last week by Gov. Tom Wolf. PA House Bill (HB) 2293 requires pipeline operators to provide emergency response plans upon request to the secretary of the Public Utility Commission, the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, and the Emergency Management Director for each county where the pipeline runs through a densely populated area.
Yesterday Pennsylvania’s Independent Fiscal Office (IFO) released its latest quarterly Natural Gas Production Report–for July through September 2020 (full copy below). The report shows natgas production in PA rose 2.0% compared to the same period last year, which is the lowest increase on record since the shale revolution began. The number of new wells spud (drilled) in 3Q20 was 111, down 18% over 3Q19.
In September MDN brought you the news that pipeline company Enbridge is building a solar farm to provide electricity to power (in part) a Texas Eastern Transmission Pipeline Company (TETCO) compressor station in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, which is a first (see 
Last Wednesday Shawn Lehman, from the Pennsylvania Dept. of Conservation & Natural Resources’ (DCNR) Resource Inventory and Monitoring Section, gave an update on DCNR’s ongoing efforts to monitor environmental and natural resource impacts of shale gas drilling on state forest land. We learned some interesting facts about shale drilling on PA state land as part of the presentation.
Monday night the radical Sierra Club hosted a virtual town hall in which people could complain about the Mariner East 2 (ME2) pipeline project. And complain they did. The aim of the virtual complaint session is to try and close down the already up-and-running ME pipelines (plural), and most particularly prevent the final bit of ME2X from getting completed. By airing sob stories, the Clubbers are hoping to bully the state Dept. of Environmental Protection and/or the Governor into blocking further work on the project–a project just a few months from being done.
The Pennsylvania Senate previously passed and yesterday “concurred” (signed-off on) Senate Bill 790, sending it to Gov. Tom Wolf for his signature. SB 790 restores sanity to regulations for conventional oil and gas drillers in the Keystone State. Unfortunately, Gov. Wolf has stubbornly said he will veto this common sense bill. Why are we not surprised?
EOG Resources, one of the largest oil and gas drillers in the U.S. (with operations in Trinidad and China too) has just sold *all* of its Marcellus assets located in Bradford County, PA to (we’ll tell you below, MDN has the exclusive on this) for $130 million. EOG has now left the M-U building.
Here’s a little known fact: Fracking for natural gas in shale only extracts about 20% of the methane gas that’s trapped in shale rock, meaning (of course) that 80% of the gas gets left behind. Researchers with the Dept. of Energy’s (DOE) Los Alamos National Laboratory have made what we consider an astonishing breakthrough discovery: Too much pressure used during fracking actually locks some of the methane away tighter in the shale, instead of loosening it. In a published paper revealing their results (full copy below), researchers recommend a range of pressures to use to optimize (increase) recovery rates for methane in the Marcellus.