Diversified Energy | Energy Companies | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Regulation | Statewide PA
DEP and Diversified Gas & Oil Compromise on Plugging Old PA Wells
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 over millions of acres and tens of thousands of wells–many of them located in Pennsylvania. Last fall the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) told Diversified it wants 1,000 of its nonproducing wells plugged in the next five years. Diversified countered it would like to plug 2,000 wells, but over the next 20 years. They ended up compromising.
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Ever notice how predators like to hunt in packs? First the Chester County, PA District Attorney launched an ethically questionable “investigation” into “crimes” that may have been committed by building the Mariner East pipelines through his county (see 
Did Williams just float an alternative/competitive pipeline to PennEast? Sure looks that way to us. On Friday Williams announced a binding open season to add 34 miles of looping pipeline next to existing Transco pipeline along with beefing up some of it’s compressor stations, in a bid to increase flows along the Transco from Luzerne County, PA (where PennEast would originate) to Mercer County, NJ (where PennEast would terminate).
Anti-fossil fuelers are once again riding their high horse “demanding” that the Municipal Authority of Westmoreland County block any more shale drilling on county-owned property located near Beaver Run Reservoir. Even though CNX’s shale drilling has been going on there since 2011 with zero impacts on the reservoir and its water supply.
In early 2018, the federal EPA approved a new Marcellus wastewater injection well for the Pittsburgh suburb of Plum Borough (see 
Russian native Boris Brevnov (former Enron executive) and his partner Charles Ryan (a Radnor native, once the chief country officer in Moscow for Deutsche Bank), are now one vote away from Philadelphia City Council approving a $60 million Marcellus LNG export facility, to be built on property owned by Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW).
In late December, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that so-called “stripper wells” can be taxed under the 2012 Act 13 law, slapped with an impact fee assessment if those wells produce more than 90 thousand cubic feet per day (Mcf/d) of gas in a single month, any month (see 
Our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, published a post yesterday on the topic of “U.S. natural gas processing plant capacity and throughput have increased in recent years.” In that post EIA links to a handy dandy online tool that lists all of the active natural gas processing plants operating in the U.S. We used the tool to download all of the plants in PA, OH and WV, and further trimmed out the low volume (conventional only) processing plants, leaving a list of sweet 16 Marcellus/Utica processing plants–where they are located and how much they process.
We’ve just caught wind of a “new” pipeline project coming from National Fuel Gas Company (NFG) in northwestern Pennsylvania that will beef up and extend an existing pipeline network to flow an extra 330 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of Marcellus gas to Williams’ mighty Transco Pipeline. It’s called the FM100 Project. Kind of sources like a radio station, no?
Eureka Resources owns and operates three centralized treatment/recycling facilities that process flowback/produced waters (i.e. wastewater) from the Marcellus Shale. Two of the facilities are located in Williamsport (Lycoming County), PA, and one in Standing Stone Township (Bradford County), PA, near Towanda. Eureka has just announced a joint venture to use high tech to recover lithium from the Marcellus wastewater they process. How cool is that?!
In 1990 a landowner freely sold (rather than have taken by eminent domain) land in Lawrence County to the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission for a new highway project. In 2012 the landowner filed a lawsuit claiming when selling the land, she did not sell the mineral rights. She wants to lease under the property for shale drilling. Yesterday Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania denied her request.