Clinton County, PA Petchem Plant One Step Closer with Grants
In February MDN brought you news about a new half-billion-dollar petrochemical plant that will convert Marcellus Shale gas into feedstock (chemicals) to be used in agriculture, manufacturing, medicine, and transportation, coming in Clinton County, PA (see $500M Marcellus-Fed Petchem Plant Coming to Clinton County, PA). The project has just gotten a step closer to reality with a pair of grants to conduct third party studies.
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In July Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf signed into law House Bill (HB) 732, a bill that will grant tax breaks to companies willing to build brand new petrochemical plants in the Keystone State–plants that use huge quantities of Marcellus Shale gas (see 
Equitrans Midstream, which used to be part of EQT as EQT Midstream, is still EQT’s main squeeze when it comes to gathering pipelines connected to its wells. The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) announced yesterday it has fined Equitrans $427,650 for “slips, stabilization, and erosion and sedimentation violations at pipeline sites in Greene, Washington and Westmoreland counties.”
An unusual situation for permits to drill new wells for last week. Pennsylvania only had 5 new permits while West Virginia had 12 new permits. It’s typically the other way around. Could this be the beginning of the effects from PA raising the permit fee from $5,000 to $12,500 per well? Maybe! Ohio had no new Utica permits issued last week. Drilling seems to have slowed in the Buckeye State.
It could have been avoided. The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) has no one to blame but themselves for what happened at Marsh Creek Lake in Chester County, PA, when Energy Transfer (ET), drilling underground to install a pipeline for the Mariner East 2 project, experienced a drilling mud spill in August (see 
Energy Transfer (ET), builder and operator of the Revolution Pipeline in southwestern Pennsylvania, last week received permission from the state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) to reroute a section that “slipped” after record rainfall two years ago, resulting in an explosion in Beaver County.
CNX Resources has applied for permits to drill up to seven new Utica shale gas wells on a single pad in Washington Township on the grounds of the Municipal Authority of Westmoreland County. The reason it’s raising a few eyebrows is that the new pad is in the general vicinity of the company’s faulty Shaw 1G well.
Last Friday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a “settlement” (with no admission of guilt) with MarkWest Energy, with MarkWest paying a $150,000 fine for failure to monitor for air emissions leaks at its Liberty Bluestone facility in Butler County, PA.
Last week the extremely unpopular Pennsylvania Governor, Tom Wolf, vetoed a bill that would have given all citizens in the Keystone State, via their elected representatives in the state legislature, a say in whether or not the state should join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). RGGI is a huge new $2.4 billion tax on coal and gas-fired power plants that will drive up the cost of electricity dramatically across the state.
Two days ago MDN brought you news that natural gas prices in the Marcellus/Utica region are about to get really ugly, at least for the next couple of months (see 
Unrepentant. That’s the best single word we can think of describing the attitude of “leaders” in Grant Township (Indiana County, PA) who illegally passed their own set of environmental laws, violating the PA state constitution, in a bid to prevent a safe saltwater injection well from being built in a rural location in the town. Grant continues to use radicalized lawyers in their lawbreaking bid to prevent the well.
In September 2018, MDN brought you the news that six men had been charged with conspiring to illegally alter emissions systems on 30+ trucks with heavy-duty diesel engines, trucks used to haul water and wastewater to and from Marcellus Shale wells (see 
S&P Global analysts have been looking at natural gas production numbers for Pennsylvania. The most recently available data is from June (numbers are always delayed a few months). S&P found that shale gas production in PA dropped 2% in June from May, to 18.48 Bcf/d. June’s numbers were essentially flat to the same time in 2019.