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Expand’s Susquehanna Week: Minor Pad Fire, New 4-Mile Water Line
Expand Energy’s operating arm made the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) news twice last week, both times in Susquehanna County. One item sounds scary but isn’t: A small “flash fire” inside a compressor building on a well pad, and the equipment put it out before firefighters arrived. The other is a new permit for a 4-mile temporary waterline that will carry fresh water to Expand’s Marcellus wells in Auburn Township. It’s the second such line DEP has OK’d in that township in a month. David Hess at PA Environment Digest Blog flagged both items. Here’s the scoop. Read More “Expand’s Susquehanna Week: Minor Pad Fire, New 4-Mile Water Line”
The Marcellus/Utica region received 29 new drilling permits last week, September 28 – October 4, nearly double the 16 permits issued two weeks earlier. Pennsylvania issued 20 of the new permits. Ohio issued 9 new permits. And West Virginia got skunked, issuing no new permits. The drillers who received new permits last week were: Blackhill Energy, Coterra Energy (now Devon Energy), EOG Resources, Expand Energy, Gulfport Energy, Infinity Natural Resources (INR), and Snyder Brothers. 
Big Tech has a new problem, and it isn’t computer chips. It’s the neighbors. In Hazle Township (Luzerne County, PA), a data center developer offered $10,000 to every one of the town’s 4,500 households if they’d just let the project go forward. Most residents said “no thanks,” the township said no, and the developer is now suing. A week later, Amazon announced it will spend more than $1 billion over five years in communities that host its data centers, in an effort to cool a national backlash. Here’s why that matters to anyone who makes a living from Marcellus/Utica gas. 
A Pennsylvania House committee held a hearing on Monday about spreading brine from conventional oil and gas wells on township dirt roads. Former Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary David Hess testified and proposed a fix aimed squarely at Marcellus drillers: make the shale industry recycle all brine from Pennsylvania’s conventional wells, “at no cost to conventional well owners.” Shale isn’t the problem here, but it could end up with the bill. 
The radical green groups trying to ban new Marcellus/Utica drilling in Pennsylvania through the back door haven’t gone away. They push shale well “setbacks” out to as much as a mile. Yesterday (Oct. 7), a coalition led by the Clean Air Council and Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) marked the two-year anniversary of its rulemaking petition and pushed in Harrisburg, calling on the Shapiro administration to act. The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) still plans to deliver its recommendation to the Environmental Quality Board (EQB) by the end of this year. The antis are making noise. We need to make more. 
A coalition of 26 state attorneys general, led by West Virginia AG JB McCuskey, is urging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to adopt a proposed rule that would let interstate pipelines do bigger upgrades, faster, without FERC’s full project-by-project review. All three Republican AGs in our neck of the woods signed on: West Virginia’s McCuskey, Pennsylvania’s Dave Sunday, and Ohio’s D. Andrew Wilson. The 24-page comment letter, dated Oct. 6, is a point-by-point rebuttal to a blue-state coalition (New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, California, and friends) that wants FERC to scrap the whole idea. It’s a wonky fight over a wonky program, but it matters a great deal to drillers, pipeline companies, and royalty owners in the Marcellus/Utica. 
On Tuesday, a crowd of protesters packed the Pennsylvania Capitol Rotunda in Harrisburg to demand a statewide moratorium (a ban, really) on new data centers. Most of the coverage framed it as an outpouring of everyday Pennsylvanians fed up with Big Tech. MDN took a closer look at who organized the rally, who arranged the buses, and who stood at the microphone. What we found: the same groups and many of the same faces that have fought shale drilling, pipelines, and gas-fired power plants in this state for the past 15 years. New signs. Same agenda. 
The Allegheny County Board of Health has fired the first shot in what looks like a slow-motion campaign to squeeze shale drilling out of the county. At its September meeting, the board voted unanimously to have the county health department look into whether Article 21, the county’s air pollution rulebook, should be rewritten to remove permitting exemptions that oil and gas operations now enjoy. Nothing changes yet. But the idea came straight out of the board’s own “Fracking Committee,” chaired by a writer for an anti-fracking group, and the folks at Food & Water Watch are already celebrating. Here’s what happened, what it could mean for drillers and landowners in Allegheny County, and why MDN isn’t buying the “it’s just a review” line. 
On Sept. 22, Alpha Compute Corp. (Nasdaq: ALP) said it was buying an old Pennsylvania oil field (county not named) for $5.5 million and planned to put a second 200 MW data center on it (see 
A federal judge in Williamsport has thrown out two 10-year-old lawsuits filed by northeastern Pennsylvania landowners who claimed Anadarko, Mitsui, and Williams (the old Access Midstream) were running a mob-style racket to shrink royalty checks. If that sounds familiar, it should. The same lawyers made the same argument in a sister case we first told you about in 2015, and the same judge tossed that one too. The landowners’ “Chesapeake/Access conspiracy” theory is now zero for three. 
The highly functional and responsible Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), unlike its dysfunctional and irresponsible counterpart, the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), continues to support the shale energy industry by approving water withdrawals and consumptive use requests for responsible, safe shale drilling. The SRBC published a notice in the September 26th Pennsylvania Bulletin that the SRBC approved and/or renewed 35 general water use permits in August for individual shale gas well drilling pads in Bradford, Clinton, Elk, Lycoming, Sullivan, Susquehanna, Tioga, and Wyoming counties.