Coterra Energy (Cabot O&G) | Energy Companies | Industrywide Issues | Litigation | Pennsylvania | Susquehanna County
Cabot Settles Overtime Work Lawsuit by 80 PA Workers for $3.56M
A second lawsuit we’re reporting on today that had previously slipped by our usually good radar. A former Cabot Oil & Gas employee filed a lawsuit in October 2017 alleging that he and a number of other “employees” had been stiffed out of overtime payments by Cabot–that Cabot had treated them as independent contractors rather than as employees. The lawsuit was granted class certification.
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There are plenty of jobs in the shale industry in northeastern Pennsylvania–IF you have certain skills. What kind of skills? The kind that are taught at programs like at the Lackawanna College School of Petroleum and Natural Gas (PNG) in their two-year program. Or skills you can pick up at the Susquehanna County Career and Technology Center.
Shale driller Huntley & Huntley, headquartered in Monroeville (Allegheny County), PA drilled at least one well last year in the Pittsburgh suburb of Plum (also in Allegheny County). According to a landowner living nearby, H&H’s drilling and fracking of the Midas 8M well led to their water well becoming fouled. H&H disputes the claim.
Pennsylvania towns that pass sketchy local ordinances that skirt state laws are on notice: It’s going to cost you. Big. For the past several years we’ve reported on the case of Grant Township, PA that passed an ordinance cooked up by the radical Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) to try and block a state-approved injection well. The ordinance was tossed by a judge, and now the town will have to pay $102,000 in legal fees incurred by the operator.
The radical group Citizens for a Healthy Jessup is floating a plan to try and prevent any new Marcellus gas-fired electric plants from getting built in the Keystone State. Aided and abetted by a corrupt local newspaper, the group tries to pass itself off as a collection of local concerned citizens. It’s nothing of the sort.
Earlier this month MDN told you that a plan to build a $60 million Marcellus LNG export facility on property owned by Philadelphia Gas Works was just one vote away from becoming reality (see 
Diversified Gas & Oil has been on a mission to buy as many non-shale (conventional) oil and gas wells as it can in the Appalachian Basin. It owns close to 3 million acres of leases with some 60,000 (mostly) conventional oil and gas wells. That’s changing. Yesterday Diversified announced it has cut a deal to buy 107 operating (and 3 non-operating) shale wells in Pennsylvania and West Virginia for $400 million.
Last night people opposed to drilling a few wells at the U.S. Steel Edgar Thomson Plant in a Pittsburgh suburb turned up to complain that somehow a noisy, air-polluting steel plant will be made even nosier and more polluting by drilling a few shale wells on the property. It’s an absurd position to argue, but there you go.
Pennsylvania House Bill (HB) 827, which would make a permanent frack ban by the Delaware River Basin Commission (if adopted) a government “taking” or seizure of a citizens’ property liable for compensation, passed the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee yesterday with a bipartisan vote of 16-9.
Another $3 million in taxpayer-funded grants have just been handed out to three different local pipeline projects under Pennsylvania’s Pipeline Investment Program, or PIPE. Two of the projects are in northeastern PA, and the other in the Lehigh Valley area.