Accidents | Deep Well Services | Energy Companies | Energy Services | Industrywide Issues | Pennsylvania | Shell | Tioga County (PA)
Accident Kills Rig Worker on Shell Well Pad in Tioga County, PA
This news is a couple of weeks old, but we’ve only just happened across it while researching another story. On the morning of October 27, Marc Jones, an employee of Deep Well Services, was working at a Shell rig site in Tioga County, PA when “a large piece of equipment fell on him, pinning him to the platform 65 feet in the air where he was standing.” The blunt force trauma, hitting him in the head, killed him. We are always saddened to read of such accidents. Here is the one and only story we could locate describing what happened:
Read More “Accident Kills Rig Worker on Shell Well Pad in Tioga County, PA”
On January 29, 2017, EQT used underground horizontal directional drilling (HDD) to drill a hole under State Route 136 in Allegheny County, PA, to install a water pipeline. As they were drilling, using what we now know was an out-of-date map, EQT hit an abandoned coal mine full of water, and four million gallons of acid mine drainage (AMD) leaked into the Monongahela River. EQT worked hard and fast to stop the leak (stopping it two days later) and set up a system to prevent any further leaks. Now, nearly two years later, it’s time to pay the piper. EQT just agreed to a fine of $294,000 for violating the Clean Streams Law, and payment of an additional $100,000 to the Clean Streams Foundation to provide for maintenance, operation, and replacement of a system to keep AMD from leaking at the site in the future.
The last time we checked in (June) on a brewing frack ban in Penn Township (Westmoreland County), PA, a challenge to a local ordinance which allows Apex Energy and Huntley & Huntley to drill and operate wells rested with a county judge. Things have since rapidly progressed. We’re guessing the local judge ruled in favor of allowing the wells to be drilled because the case was appealed to PA Commonwealth Court. Late last week the judges in Commonwealth Court issued a ruling in favor of Penn Township’s “special exception” permits awarded to Apex Energy, allowing them to drill shale wells.
Last week MDN brought you the exciting news that New Fortress Energy is planning to build an LNG (liquefied natural gas) liquefaction plant in Wyalusing (Bradford County), PA (see 
Trout Unlimited (TU), previously outed as an anti-fracking organization (see 
Yesterday the muckety-mucks from Energy Transfer (ET) held a conference call with Wall Street analysts to discuss the company’s third quarter 2018 update. Inevitably on such calls there’s talk about what’s coming up in addition to what happened in the previous quarter. ET is a big midstream (pipeline) company. Among their projects are the mighty Rover Pipeline, which reaches from Pennsylvania, West Virgina, and eastern Ohio all the way into Michigan, and the Mariner East 2 Pipeline, which runs from eastern Ohio all the way through Pennsylvania to the Philadelphia area. Rover flows natural gas, ME2 (and ME2X) will flow NGLs, mainly ethane and propane. According to Tom Long, ET’s Chief Financial Officer, ME2 will be up and running sometime this quarter. Since the end of this quarter is around Christmastime, we prefer to think of ME2 as a Christmas present for Marcellus/Utica drillers.
It must really grate on Big Green supporters that their hero, lib Dem Tom Wolf (who just won reelection as governor of PA), continues to support fossil fuel projects. It must doubly grate on them that Wolf’s Dept. of Environmental Protection, when funding such projects, calls them “clean energy.” We love it! The PA DEP announced yesterday, two days after the big election, that they’ve just awarded $2.6 million in grants to 16 different “clean energy vehicle” projects. When you look at the list, all but $32,077 of that amount is going to fund either CNG or propane-powered vehicles. That is, fossil fuel-powered vehicles (mostly buses and trucks). And the DEP has the *audacity* (in the opinion of Big Green nuts) to call all of these projects “clean energy”! We’re laughing our considerable rear-end off.
We have some exciting news to share. A company called New Fortress Energy is planning to build an LNG (liquefied natural gas) liquefaction plant in Wyalusing (Bradford County), PA. The $800 million (!) plant will supercool and liquefy locally extracted Marcellus Shale gas and ship it first by truck, eventually by rail, to “customers in the U.S. as well as abroad.” Meaning exports. How cool is that? It seems that LNG liquefaction plants no longer have to be located along a shoreline to engage in exports. Which company will provide the gas to liquefy and export? MDN has the exclusive answer, and yes, you need to be an MDN paying subscriber to find out…
Yet another Range Resources alumnus is now working for someone else–himself. Matt Curry, a chemical engineer and Pittsburgh native who used to work for Range, along with Chris Combs, who’s worked for a number of drilling services companies in Texas, co-founded Praetorian Energy Solutions, a “pressure pumping and pumpdown services” headquartered in Canonsburg, PA. The company, launched earlier this year, is (so far) working in the Eagle Ford Shale play in Texas–because that’s where they bought their equipment. That equipment will be heading north soon to operate in the Marcellus/Utica. What is a pressure pumping/pumpdown company?
A number of times we’ve highlighted a cool training program offered by the The Gas Technology Institute (GTI). The 
The left-most contingent in the Pennsylvania Democrat Party wants to ban all fracking in the state. It’s fringe, but all such oddball movements start out as fringe. Of particular note in this election season is that a group of these ban-fracking nutters have gotten themselves on the ballot in 15 PA House and Senate races around the state. As you might expect, most of the ban-frackers are running in counties in the Philadelphia orbit (Delaware, Chester, Montgomery, Philly itself). There are some from outside (but still close to) Philly, in Northampton and Carbon counties. There are a few in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh area). There’s even one running in Centre County. We have the full list of 15 people that our friends in PA should be sure to NOT vote for in tomorrow’s very important election.
On Wednesday a man in Clarksville (Green County), PA turned on his gas stove and it exploded, catching fire to and leveling the entire house. The man, his girlfriend and young child were helicoptered to a hospital burn unit. The working theory/assumptions are (a) the man didn’t smell mercaptan, therefore the source of the gas that exploded was not from the stove or line into the house itself, and (b) because there is an EQT shale well “across the street” and a gathering pipeline that runs “next to the house,” methane “may have” migrated from the shale well to the home, or methane leaked from the gathering line into the home.
Williams’ Transco Pipeline has just won a major eminent domain court case for its Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline project that will have implications for all pipelines. Yes, Atlantic Sunrise is now in the ground and flowing natural gas (see 
On Sept. 10, Energy Transfer’s 24-inch gathering pipeline in Beaver County, PA, called the Revolution Pipeline, caught fire and exploded during testing (see