Lawsuit: Jessup Board Colluded to Punish Gas Plant Property Seller
A landowner in Jessup Borough (Lackawanna County, PA, near Scranton) has filed a lawsuit against the Borough Council as a whole (and the individuals who serve on it), claiming they rezoned the landowner’s property, cutting them out of millions of dollars, as retribution because the landowner had the audacity to sell property to the Marcellus gas-fired Lackawanna Energy Center (LEC) power plant.
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Last week the Pennsylvania House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee held an informational meeting to hear from the regulated community, including the shale industry, on their experiences with Dept. of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) permit review processes. By all accounts legislators (and the DEP) got an earful.
Here’s a cool story: Energy Transfer, the company building the Mariner East 2 Pipeline in Pennsylvania, has just committed to funding the Pennsylvania Special Olympics to the tune of $450,000 over the next three years. MDN editor Jim Willis’ wife works with special needs kids, so he has a soft spot for programs like Special Olympics. Jim thought: “Hey, this is a good news story. Surely someone in the media will have picked up the Special Olympics press release by now and published an article about this, right?” Nope. Total media blackout. We couldn’t find a single news outlet that has covered this news, now four days old.
Several members of the Marcellus Shale industry spoke at a meeting of the Williamsport/Lycoming Chamber of Commerce yesterday, including MDN friend George Stark from Cabot Oil & Gas. George is director of external affairs. At the meeting he said the Marcellus industry has made tremendous strides in the last 10 years and will be around for decades to come. He said, “It’s booming in our area.” George also said Cabot is having trouble filling vacant jobs.
A radical Pennsylvania environmental group called PennEnvironment is pushing a media narrative that a “collection of 88 Republican and Democratic Pennsylvania state legislators” have joined together to introduce and endorse a truly insane plan that would require all (as in 100%) of electricity generated in the Keystone State to come from so-called renewables by 2050–just 30 years from now. It will NEVER happen, but that’s beside the point. Our point is that one named Republican is part of this “bipartisan collection” of 88 leftists. The lone Republican is PA State Sen. Tom Killion from the Philadelphia area.
Huntingdon County, PA landowner Ellen Gerhart, adamantly opposed to the Mariner East 2 pipeline being constructed across her land, tried to block construction on her property. She had her day in court last August and was found guilty of violating a judge’s previous order to stop interfering with construction (see 
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) has just fined EQT $330,775 for erosion and sedimentation violations at two well sites in Forward Township, Allegheny County, PA. Water with sediment in it leaked from the well sites in early 2018, which sometimes happens. The reason for the stiff fine is that EQT failed to notify the DEP when it happened. If the DEP finds out via its own inspections first, the cost goes way up.
In October 2017, MDN told you a second Marcellus gas-fired electric generating plant is planned for Greene County, PA (see 
This is a glittering example of how people who fancy themselves as “smart” are actually quite stupid. The so-called political leaders of Philadelphia are commissioning a study (paid for by Mike Bloomberg) on how the city can convert Philadelphia Gas Works, the nation’s largest municipal-owned utility company, into dumping natgas. Because, ya know, global warming. It’s bizarre (and breath-taking) to watch just how stupid people can get.
In March a group of Pennsylvania landowners from Lancaster County asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case in which they say they’ve been screwed over by Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline, that the pipeline should not have had the right to use eminent domain to build the pipeline before the matter of compensation was fully adjudicated (see 
This is a “man bites dog” kind of story. Typically when we read about drilling on Pennsylvania state-owned land, the drilling happens on private land adjacent to the state land with the lateral reaching under state land (leased for that purpose). This time we spotted a story about a new well due to be drilled this year in Elk County, PA that sits directly *on* state land, and will reach under private land!
Two weeks ago MDN told you the Pennsylvania House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee approved a series of five bills that restore some sanity in how environmental regulations are made and paid for in the Keystone State (see