School Near Pittsburgh Considers EQT Deal: $2,500/Ac, 15% Royalty
Last week MDN told you about the ongoing vendetta by a few anti parents in the Mars School District (half hour from Pittsburgh, in Butler County) and their Big Green accomplices. They suffered a major court defeat (see Dela. Riverkeeper Suffers Major Defeat in Martian Well Case). Rex Energy has drilled two wells about 3/4 of a mile from one of the Mars schools, and wants to drill another four. The Martians bleat and blat that faraway drilling activity will somehow hurt “the children.” Compare that attitude with the parents (and school district officials) in the Kiski Area School District in Westmoreland County (about 40 minutes from Pittsburgh). The Kiski Area School will vote tonight on a lease deal with EQT to allow shale drilling UNDER SCHOOL PROPERTY! The district will get $2,500 per acre in a signing bonus, and 15% royalties on any gas produced. If signed, the school’s bonus check could be as high as $310,300–for “the children.” The difference in attitude (and aptitude) between the parents in Mars and the parents in Kiski could not be more striking…
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Let’s be right up front about how we feel about the innocent-sounding Trout Unlimited (TU). Four years ago the organization was outed as a radical, far-left environmentalist group–hellbent on opposing fossil fuels (see 
Good news. The main part of the Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline project–where it runs through Lancaster County, PA–is almost finished. Atlantic Sunrise is a $3 billion, 198-mile pipeline project running through 10 Pennsylvania counties to connect Marcellus Shale natural gas from northeastern PA with the Williams’ Transco pipeline in southern Lancaster County. The most opposition to the pipeline has happened in Lancaster County. Right now 90% of the pipeline has been welded in Lancaster County and sits above ground. By the end of July, all of it will be done and buried in the ground. It won’t be long after that that the entire 198 miles will begin to flow northeast PA Marcellus gas…
The average worker who works for producers (i.e. drillers) in the Pennsylvania Marcellus makes among the highest average salaries of any industry in the state. Looking at six of the state’s top Marcellus drillers, the average worker made $113,610 last year! That’s an average taken from workers at CNX Resources, Range Resources, Chesapeake Energy, Southwestern Energy, EQT and Cabot Oil & Gas. We hasten to add not “all workers” but “average” or “median” workers–meaning there are people who make below that number and people who make well above that number. It also means the majority of Marcellus workers in those companies made at least $100,000 per year. Those working for oilfield services (OFS) companies like Halliburton, Baker Hughes and others didn’t fare quite as well, making an average of $52,000-$80,000 per year. Still, hey, it ain’t bad money! Here’s a look at the average wage for top Marcellus drillers and the OFS companies that serve them…
If you’ve read MDN for any length of time, you know about a $6 billion ethane cracker plant being built by Shell in Monaca (Beaver County), PA–near Pittsburgh. The plant will chemically “crack” ethane, an abundant natural gas liquid (NGL) that comes out of the ground along with methane, creating polyethylene from the ethane. Polyethylene is, in essence, raw plastic. Manufacturers in the region and beyond will use the plastic pellets Shell will produce at the plant to create an unlimited variety products. Shell is a smart company. They’re as much a marketing company as they are an oil and gas producer and petrochemical manufacturer. They know the value of positioning and mind share. We hadn’t thought about it previously, but we always just thought of and called the project the “Shell cracker plant.” The plant now has a name: Shell Polymers. The name Shell Polymers has been around for a long time but had fallen out of use when Shell largely exited the plastics business. With the new cracker coming online in the next few years, it’s time to revive the Shell Polymers name/brand and apply it to the cracker plant, which is how the project was being pitched at the last week’s NPE2018 (formerly called the National Plastics Exposition) in Orlando, Florida…
In August 2015, MDN told you about a lawsuit brought by a group of left coast radicalized children who want to force the federal government to become communist and “force action” on mythical climate change (see 
Nearly a year ago MDN reported that Big Green group THE Delaware Riverkeeper (aka Maya van Rossum) and the odious Philadelphia-based Clean Air Council (CAC) had suffered a crushing legal defeat in their attempt to interfere with shale drilling on the opposite side of the state from where the Delaware River and Philly is located (see 
Last November we updated you on a lawsuit filed by a group of anti-fossil fuelers in Penn Township (Westmoreland County), PA (see 
In April, the Pennsylvania Joint State Government Commission released a report (full copy below) tackling the question of whether or not PA’s environmental laws and regulations are more stringent than federal requirements. The report compared the main state and federal laws in place covering clean air, clean water, natural resources, waste management and more. The report says PA’s laws, “are generally no more stringent than their federal counterparts.” But in the same paragraph, the report says, “Where additional regulations have been made, it is generally justified as a compelling and articulable Pennsylvania interest and addresses definable public health, safety or environmental risks. The area of greatest deviation involves differences between the federal Clean Water Act and the Clean Streams Law. Other more stringent regulations are found in the areas of safe drinking water, the handling of hazardous materials, and mineral extraction. In some instances, Pennsylvania regulations build upon and supplement federal law; in others, Pennsylvania has acted in areas not regulated by the federal government” (pg 6). What does that say to you? It says to us: “Heck yeah, the enviro laws in PA are a lot more strict than federal laws, but there’s good reasons (according to the authors of the report) for it.” Are there good reasons for PA raising the bar higher than the federal government requires?…
On Wednesday, Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court (an appeals court) heard oral arguments over how to prove whether contaminants in the soil have moved into groundwater. The case dates back to 2014 when the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) slapped EQT with a $4.53 million fine for a leaky wastewater impoundment in Tioga County (see 
How do you prove you aren’t biased, racist, chauvinist, etc.? That is, how can you prove a negative? You can’t. But that doesn’t stop the radical left from trying to make you do it. Here’s another question: Where do you think The Almighty State forces companies to hire people from a state-approved list? In Russia? China? Perhaps Cuba? Nope. How about Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Department of General Services (DGS) wants to force down the throats of shale companies working in the state a requirement that they hire people who DGS, a dunderheaded government agency, says they should hire–or else. Or else what? Or else those companies get “audited” and found in violation and fined out the wazoo. DGS continues to beg state lawmakers to allow it to audit natural gas companies’ efforts to hire businesses owned by women, minorities and veterans. This is nothing new. DGS, and the antis who are stoking this effort, have been agitating for a Communist crackdown on shale hiring since 2012…
Last September MDN told you that Shale Support Holdings, “a leading provider of frac sand and logistical solutions to the oil and gas proppant market” (headquartered in Texas, with an operations center in Mississippi), was stepping up its presence in the Marcellus/Utica region with a partnership with Tidewater Logistics (see 
Knowing that the PennEast Pipeline project is about to become reality, a very desperate THE Delaware Riverkeeper (aka Maya van Rossum) has launched a major legal attack against the project–using Big Green money. These are not the first legal filings by Riverkeeper against PennEast. The current strategy appears to be “bury them in legal horse manure.” PennEast Pipeline is a 120-mile pipeline from near Wilkes-Barre, PA to near Trenton, NJ. The planned route passes through Luzerne, Carbon, Northampton, and Bucks counties in PA, and through Mercer and Hunterdon counties in NJ. The pipeline is needed to move PA’s abundant Marcellus gas to markets in NJ. The first “legal maneuver” by Riverkeeper this week was to file a petition for a “Writ of Mandamus” in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the court to force the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to respond to Riverkeeper’s rehearing request on the PennEast project. At the same time, Riverkeeper filed a “Petition for Review” with the D.C. Circuit Court of appeals challenging all of FERC’s orders related to PennEast. It is a full, frontal legal attack by a small organization fronting for other groups like the William Penn Foundation. The question is, will Riverkeeper’s latest attack work?…