Anti-Drilling/Fossil Fuel | Energy Services | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Pipelines | Statewide PA | Sunoco Logistics
Philly Pipe Protesters Go to Harrisburg, Picket Gov’s Empty Office
A small group of southeast Pennsylvania pipeline protesters drove themselves to Harrisburg on Wednesday (using fossil fuels to get there) to demand Gov. Tom Wolf put a halt to construction of the legally-permitted Mariner East 2 pipeline, and essentially shut down the operation of the entire Mariner East network (ME1, ME2 and ME2X). Gov. Wolf wasn’t even in his office, so they were picketing and protesting for nothing. Oh well, the wackos get an “A” for effort, right?
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In June there was a series of explosions and a massive fire at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) Refining Complex, the East Coast’s oldest and largest oil refinery (see 
Allegheny County, PA (Pittsburgh and surrounding suburbs) is seriously considering a new law that would require landowners to report, via a public registry, land they have leased oil and gas drilling. Specifically land leased for shale wells. The law would require all sorts of private information to be divulged, publicly, including what kind of drilling/fracking will theoretically take place. And what if a landowner doesn’t “register” with the authorities? Here come the fines. The only reason we can divine for such a law is to shame landowners (lease-shaming), to prompt neighbors to hassle them for leasing their land. Or perhaps to alert Big Green groups so they can use paid protesters (as they so often do) to show up and protest in front of someone’s leased property. What has our society become?
Leave it to ace reporter Paul Gough from the Pittsburgh Business Times to unearth some earth-shattering news–that ExxonMobil is actively looking at locations in Beaver County, Pennsylvania to potentially build a second multi-billion dollar cracker plant. Shell is already well along in building the region’s first ethane cracker–in Monaca (Beaver County). Will lightning strike twice for the good citizens of Beaver County? Maybe!
Last year the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued administrative orders requiring three oil and gas companies–Alliance Petroleum Corporation (a subsidiary of Diversified Gas & Oil), XTO Energy, and CNX Resources–to plug 1,058 abandoned oil and gas wells across Pennsylvania (see 
What happens when two of three elected town supervisors either have a lease with a pipeline company, or have close family members who have leases with the pipeline company, and they must vote to approve a new power plant project that would use shale gas from that pipeline to power it? It’s called a conflict of interest, and we’re about to find out the answer to that question in Robinson Township (Washington County), PA.
Xtreme Energy Co., headquartered in Victoria, Texas, has been ordered by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) to shut down/stop producing at two Marcellus wells operated by the company located in Somerset County, PA, in the southwestern part of the state. Why? Because, says the DEP, Xtreme has not paid its impact fee (i.e. severance tax) for those wells for 2014, 2015 and 2016.
Here’s a cautionary tale for landowners who think they can go court-shopping on the other side of the country to settle their differences with pipelines that cross their land. Don’t do it. A Pennsylvania landowner in Schuylkill County, PA thought he could force Williams’ (Transco Pipeline) into arbitration to compensate him for allowing the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline crossing his land. Except the landowner filed for arbitration in California! Williams/Transco refused to participate in the arbitration since Cali has NOTHING to do with Pennsylvania when it comes to arbitrating compensation for eminent domain.
Leftist Democrats in Pennsylvania are still hopping mad that they couldn’t block Invenergy’s 1,480 megawatt, $1 billion Marcellus gas-fired electric plant called the Lackawanna Energy Center, located near Scranton, PA (see 
The so-called FracTracker Alliance is a group of leftist anti-fossil fuelers who heavily shade the truth (i.e. lie) about the “health impacts” of shale drilling in western Pennsylvania. In May some two dozen FracTracker “volunteers” visited the Pine Creek Watershed in parts of Clinton, Lycoming, Potter and Tioga counties. Their stated purpose was to “catalog the impacts of the unconventional oil and gas industry and related infrastructure on the landscape.” The effort resulted in a false map misrepresenting even basic facts about shale drilling in the region. The Marcellus Shale Coalition could not keep silent about FracTracker’s false and misleading narrative, and wrote to set the record straight.