PA DEP Holds its First CPP “Listening Session”
On Tuesday the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection held it’s first “listening session” to consider which creative ways they will cut the economic throat of the state by attempting to comply with nonsensical carbon standards set by our Dear Leader, Barack H. Obama, via his so-called Clean Power Plan (see PA Anti-Fossil Fuel Groups Praise Wolf/Quigley for Supporting CPP). The master of ceremonies for the three-hour event was none other than the PennFuture Secretary of the DEP himself, John Quigley, who said Obama’s nutty standards are “ambitious, but achievable.” Most of the 27 speakers were a stacked deck–there to support the CPP standards. There were, however, a few voices of common sense and reason among the blithering idiots…
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While two, possibly three, major ethane cracker plant projects are being considered for the Marcellus/Utica region, there are six ethane crackers currently being built in the Gulf Coast region. The kicker? Marcellus and Utica Shale ethane will feed some of, perhaps portions for all of, those six cracker plants. It’s a shame, really. We could be reaping the rewards of a massive influx of jobs and investment not only by building an ethane cracker, but with the satellite businesses that will locate around it. Instead, much of that investment and those jobs are slipping away to the Gulf via NGL pipelines…
An interesting article in the Philadelphia Inquirer provides some of the history, and an update, for the Marcus Hook refinery in the Philly area. You may recall that Sunoco Logistics Partners purchased the refinery and is in the process of turning it into an NGL export facility–to send ethane, propane and other NGLs to locations along the U.S. coastline and internationally to Europe. What you may not know (what we sure didn’t know) is that Sunoco LP hopes to one day build a propane cracker at the site–a facility that will convert propane into propylene, the raw material used to make plastics. Who knew?! This would be yet another cracker plant that would compete, in a small way, with the proposed Shell cracker plant planned for the Pittsburgh area…
A major defeat for Pennsylvania’s anti-drilling groups, including THE Delaware Riverkeeper, was just handed down by the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court in a Lycoming County zoning case. In Gorsline v. Board of Supervisors of Fairfield Township, anti-drilling neighbors, including Brian and Dawn Gorsline, Paul and Michele Batkowski and others (collectively “Gorsline”) sued to stop a conditional use permit granted by Fairfield Township to allow Inflection Energy to construct a well pad on the property of Donald and Eleanor Shaheen. The case was weak, but the lowest court in the PA court system–the Court of Common Pleas (i.e. county court)–said the ninny nanny neighbors had a right to strip away the Shaheen’s property rights to allow drilling on their own property. The PA Commonwealth Court obliterated the faulty reasoning of the lower court and has, significantly, redefined how courts should interpret the results of the Act 13 zoning lawsuit that allows local municipalities the right to restrict shale drilling. The Commonwealth Court decision (full copy below) has kicked the legal legs out from under those seeking to use an amicus brief filed by THE Delaware Riverkeeper in the Act 13 case…
Pennsylvania’s shale drilling industry is pushing back against the last minute changes made to PA’s oil and gas regulations commonly known as Article 78. In April the Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association (PIOGA) turned up the heat on newly-elected Gov. Tom Wolf and PennFuture Dept. of Environmental Protection Secretary John Quigley with a scorching hot letter (see 
Cabot Oil & Gas is one of the stellar success stories of the Marcellus Shale. They drill in a single northeastern Pennsylvania county–Susquehanna County (near where MDN is located). From that single county Cabot produces 1.7-1.8 billion cubic feet (Bcf) per day of natural gas. If you want to know how to “do it right” with shale drilling in the Marcellus–you watch Cabot. The company participated in the Barclays CEO Energy/Power Conference 2015 last week in New York City. We grabbed a copy of their PowerPoint presentation from that event and include it below, along with some of the insights we glean from reviewing the presentation…
Sunoco Logistics Partners, which owns the Mariner series of pipelines (East, West and South), has just launched a new binding open season–time when drillers and other shippers can sign up for capacity–for an expansion of the planned Mariner East 2 project. In April 2014 MDN brought you the news that Sunoco LP had completed an open season for Mariner East 2 and had enough customers to move forward with the project (see 
Pennsylvania Democrats are finally waking up and beginning to get nervous that state Republicans might actually not cave on a Marcellus-killing severance tax after all. How do we know? One of the Democrat public relations outlets–the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette–penned an “editorial” calling for a stopgap, short-term budget. PA’s Gov. Tom Wolf, who has been crowned the most liberal governor in America by the non-partisan website InsideGov (see 
Pennsylvania landowners Andrew and Sally Dewing signed a 10-year lease for 493 acres of land in Bradford County, PA with Central Appalachian Petroleum in April 2001. The lease was later sold to a consortium including Abarta Oil & Gas Co., Talisman Energy USA and Range Resources. The terms of the lease require rent payments of $5 per acre per year ($2,465) for each year when their property has not be drilled on or under. After not receiving payments on time in 2010, the Dewings served the drillers notice of nonpayment. Eventually the three partners figured out who was supposed to pay and made the payment–but because the payment was late (more than 60 days late), the Dewings claimed the lease was terminated under the original terms of the lease. To make a long story short, Pennsylvania Superior Court ruled last Friday that no, the terms of the lease do not allow the Dewings to get out of the lease because the payment was late…
Grant Township in Indiana County, PA has a problem: They’ve hired a potty mouth lawyer to represent them who has a HUGE conflict of interest. Grant’s town attorney is also the lawyer for (and executive director of) the litigious and extreme left-wing group Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), a group committed to ending the use of fossil fuels. We’ve written plenty about the antics of the CELDF, including their lawsuit on behalf of an ecosystem (see 
Is Marcellus drilling about to come to a suburb of Pittsburgh? It appears the answer to that is a resounding, “Yes!” EQT, according to a landman that works for the company, plans to put a mega drill pad with up to 14 wells on an abandoned golf course in the eastern burbs of Allegheny County. EQT has approached neighbors surrounding the property, attempting to sign them to leases. Predictably, some of the neighbors are for it, and some are against it…
Natural gas customers in Philadelphia could have had all of the outdated and unsafe pipes belonging to the aging Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW) pipeline network replaced within 5-10 years, paid for by UIL Holdings Corporation, a Connecticut-based gas and electric utility holding company that offered to buy PGW in a deal brokered by Democrat Mayor Michael Nutter. But the corrupt Philadelphia City Council torpedoed the deal (see 
Pennsylvania’s Democrats continue to fight dirty in the budget battle–in their losing effort to pile big taxes on a single industry, the Marcellus Shale industry. The latest in the dirty war they’re waging: the extremely partisan Democrat-controlled so-called Independent Fiscal Office (yes, a PA state government office funded by taxpayers) has issued a report to sycophantic media outlets (but not the general public via its website) to forecast a decrease in Marcellus Shale impact fee revenue for 2015…