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PA Sen. Gene Yaw to Intro Bill Blocking NatGas Sales to NY-NJ-MD
Over the years MDN has heard the oft-repeated comment that if New York and other states want to block new pipelines, maybe Pennsylvania should quit shipping its gas to those states. PA State Senator Gene Yaw has also heard those comments and, in a brilliant move, Yaw will soon introduce a bill that does precisely that: block natural gas shipments to states like New York, New Jersey and Maryland–states attempting to (or have) blocked new pipelines from PA.
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Swamp dwellers are recoiling in horror that the Pennsylvania House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee has just approved a series of bills that restores some sanity in how environmental regulations are made and paid for in the Keystone State. The bills begin, in a small way, to take back control of our system of creating laws, returning authority for making laws to the PA legislature, instead of creating and forcing laws on citizens by unelected, nameless, faceless, swamp-dwelling bureaucrats in regulatory agencies like the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). Let us explain.
Last November, a variety of Big Green groups including the Clean Air Council, Widener University Environmental Law and Sustainability Center, eco(n)law LLC and 61 others submitted a “rulemaking petition” (407-page plan) to the Pennsylvania Environment Quality Board (EQB) requesting the Board and PA Gov. Tom Wolf establish a cap-and-trade greenhouse gas emission reduction program to eliminate carbon emissions from major sources by 2052. It’s a bizarre plan, meant to eliminate fossil fuel production and use, including Marcellus Shale production. Yesterday the EQB voted to accept and consider this cockamamie plan.
It’s no secret that upstream companies (drillers) like EQT are trimming head count and reducing annual spending. So it probably won’t come as a surprise that EQT has put 46,000 square feet (out of 250,000 sq. ft.) in its palatial headquarters in downtown Pittsburgh up for sublease. Meanwhile, in a contrasting bit of news, midstream (pipeline) company Williams has just renewed the lease for its big regional Pittsburgh headquarters at Park Place Corporate Center–a 112,481 sq. ft. building.
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) is grabbing more money that we think belongs to private landowners. This time from leasing land underneath the Youghiogheny River and Little Pine Creek. DCNR has leased 124.2 acres for a signing bonus of $496,800 (or $4,000 per acre). Plus the state’s customary royalty rate of 20% on anything produced. And no, the state does not allow post-production deductions–they get their full 20% royalty.
Yesterday the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) Air Quality Technical Advisory Committee voted to recommend the DEP move forward with a proposed new regulation to control volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions, with a side benefit of reducing methane emissions, from existing oil and gas operations. It was a split vote, but it propels the regs to the next level.
The sleazy elected commissioners of Chester County have just sued Sunoco Logistics Partners to try and stop construction of the Mariner East 2 Pipeline on two county-owned properties where the pipeline has a legitimate, legal right to build. One of the commissioners actually uses these lawsuits as fundraisers (see 
Coastal Chemical, the North American subsidiary of German company Brenntag, sells chemicals (used in fracking) to the oil and gas industry. Coastal Chemical wants to build a chemical storage facility in Montgomery (Lycoming County), PA, near Williamsport. The facility would house ten tanks, each holding 12,000 gallons of chemicals. The local volunteer fire chief and the local emergency management coordinator are both “strongly opposed” to the project.
Pennsylvania State Senators Camera Bartolotta (Washington County) and Pat Stefano (Fayette County) have just beaten PA Gov. Tom Wolf at his own game. Wolf has been gallivanting around the state like Santa Claus promoting a plan called Restore PA, a plan that will get rid of lead paint in schools, fix flooding, repair old roads, give rural residents internet access, and just about any other goody you can think of. Wolf wants to pay for it by slapping a severance tax on the Marcellus industry. Bartolotta and Stefano are introducing two bills that would fund Wolf’s folly–but do so by allowing new shale drilling on state land. Game, set, and match!
A joint announcement between Kendra II LLC and De Nora says a new wastewater recycling facility aimed at the shale industry will go online in late May providing drillers in the “heart of the Marcellus Shale” (in Susquehanna County, PA) a new option to recycle and reuse produced water…up to 18,000 barrels a day.
What will Pennsylvania’s future with respect to energy look like 25 years from now? What role will shale gas play? And how will that role affect the state? A group of 35 people began to study that question in the summer of 2017 and the end result, a new study, has just been released (full copy below). According to the study’s results, there are two distinct paths PA can take, resulting in two very different outcomes.