Oral Arguments for Lawsuit re Shale Drill Cuttings at PA Landfill
In January 2024, MDN told you about a long-closed landfill that seeks to reopen in Liberty and Pine Townships in Mercer County, PA (see Group Claims Drill Cuttings for Grove City Landfill “Radioactive”). In 2020, Tri-County Landfill Inc. submitted a permit application for the construction and operation of a municipal waste landfill site operated from 1950 to 1990. One of the objections to reopening the landfill is that it may accept drill cuttings from fracked wells. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued a permit to allow the project to proceed. The permit was challenged, and the challenge was rejected. Those who object to the landfill reopening appealed their rejected challenge to PA’s Commonwealth Court. The court heard oral arguments two weeks ago. Read More “Oral Arguments for Lawsuit re Shale Drill Cuttings at PA Landfill”
For the week of May 5 – 11, the number of permits issued to drill new wells in the Marcellus/Utica was up four from the previous week. Last week, 26 new permits were issued in the M-U. In the Keystone State (PA), 13 new permits were issued. The top permittee was Seneca Resources, which had eight permits spread across two pads in Lycoming and Tioga counties. Olympus Energy, which is being sold to EQT, scored four permits for a pad in Allegheny County. And Infinity Natural Resources (INR) received a single permit in Indiana County. 
We spotted a story that got us thinking. Pennsylvania is the #1 exporter of electricity in the country, exporting some 26% of all the electricity it produces. Such exports give the state an opportunity to profit from building more gas-fired power, leveraging cheap Marcellus gas. However, exporting electricity is a complex issue. PA State Senator Kristin Phillips-Hill, Republican from York, PA, is sounding the alarm over the electricity exporting issue. She makes some great points… 
In December, MDN told you that the country’s largest electric grid, PJM Interconnection, which covers all or parts of 13 states, including PA, OH, and WV, proposed changes to how it decides which new power plants can connect to the system first. The new policy *favors* adding natural gas-fired power over other types of power like unreliable solar and wind (see 
Diversified Energy, with significant assets in the Marcellus/Utica region (and other regions too), owns approximately 8 million acres of leases with close to 70,000 (mostly) conventional oil and gas wells. The company’s business model is to buy lower-producing wells on the cheap and find ways to make them more productive. One of the new ways Diversified is looking to make money with old wells is by mining cryptocurrency at wells in remote locations not hooked to a pipeline network. In March 2023, MDN told you that Diversified would try crypto-mining at a well in Elk County, Pennsylvania (see 
Infinity Natural Resources (INR), headquartered in Morgantown, WV, focuses 100% on the Marcellus/Utica. The company went public earlier this year with a $265 million ($20/share) initial public offering, giving INR a $1.18 billion market capitalization (see 
Yesterday, the seven members of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court (five Democrats and two Republicans) heard oral arguments in a lawsuit that attempts to force PA to accept the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), an obscene carbon tax on coal- and gas-fired power plants. Former Democrat Governor Tom Wolf tried to force the state to join RGGI in 2019 (see 
We’re catching up on two weeks of changes in the rig count, and wow! Things changed. And NOT in a good way. The national count lost nine rigs over the past two weeks, going from 587 on April 25 to 584 on May 2 and then down to 578 on May 9. But it was the Marcellus/Utica that caught our attention. Two weeks ago, for the May 2 Baker Hughes rig count, Ohio dropped three rigs in a single week, going from 12 on April 25 to nine on May 2. The Ohio count remained at nine on May 9. Consequently, the combined M-U count went from 38 two weeks ago to 35 and has remained at that level. Both Pennsylvania and West Virginia kept their same counts of 18 and 8, respectively. 
Coterra Energy, formed by the merger of Cabot Oil & Gas (drills for natural gas in the Marcellus) and Cimarex Energy (drills for oil in the Permian and Anadarko basins), issued its first quarter 2025 update last week. There was a lot of news coming from the update. However, two things stood out for us: (1) Coterra confirmed that talks to revive the Constitution Pipeline project are underway now, and (2) the company is drilling again in the PA Marcellus and may add another $50 million to 2025’s planned $300 million budget for the Marcellus. 
In November 2023, CNX Resources CEO Nick DeIuliis signed a voluntary deal with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro to expand drilling setbacks and several other regulatory steps not mandated for shale drillers under PA law (see 
In January, MDN reported that the PJM Interconnection electrical grid operator, covering Pennsylvania (along with all or parts of 12 other states and the District of Columbia), had caved to the political demands of PA Gov. Josh Shapiro to artificially cap the prices of the next capacity auction scheduled for July 2025 (see 
In January, MDN brought you the news that TECfusions, based in Tampa, Florida, had purchased 1,395 acres in Upper Burrell (Westmoreland County), PA, for a groundbreaking data center project called TECfusions Keystone Connect (see