EPA Visits Pittsburgh for Final Hearing on Methane Emissions Law
Your beliefs matter. For example, if you believe in the fairy tale of man-made global warming (see Inconvenient Global Warming Fact: Avg Temp Hasn’t Risen in 18 Yrs), then you will attempt to force the greatest country on earth–the United States–to abandon the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. It is that erroneous belief that animates the Kool Aid drinkers in the so-called environmental movement. If you’re a real creep, you try to prey on the unthinking public’s fears that the planet will bake and your health is at risk by continued extraction of fossil fuels. The federal EPA is preying on those fears with their latest power grab to illegally regulate the oil and gas industry through the back door by creating new, unlegislated laws to reduce so-called methane emissions from oil and gas drilling. Regulation of oil and gas drilling is Constitutionally left to the individual states. The EPA wants to corrupt that and was in Pittsburgh yesterday for a final public hearing on their draconian new unlegislated laws on methane emissions. The EPA got an earful–from both anti-drilling wackos and from the oil and gas industry…
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Low energy Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush (as Donald Trump calls him) has decided to inject some high energy (as in the energy industry) into his campaign. Jeb is today visiting the Pittsburgh headquarters of one of the Marcellus/Utica’s most successful drillers–Rice Energy–to unveil his energy plan that calls for the lifting of the crude oil export ban (something our Dear Leader, President Obama, opposes) and for the approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline (Obama also opposes). However, the thing that makes Jeb’s visit to Rice Energy salient and meaningful for the Marcellus/Utica is that he will call for (a) lifting restrictions on exporting natural gas–making it easier to export natgas to Japan, China and European countries, and (b) fight Obama’s Clean Power Plan (CPP). There is no doubt Bush will say all of the right words and espouse policies the oil and gas industry can strongly support. The question is, will he actually do any of it if he gets elected?…
The Washington County (PA) Firemen’s Association recently opened a new $500,000 gas well training center at the fire academy located at 895 Western Ave in Houston, PA. The project, which took more than a year to plan and complete, was completely funded by some of the biggest and best drillers in the Marcellus/Utica, including Range Resources, Rice Energy, CONSOL Energy, EQT, American Well Service and others. It will be used to train first responders not only in Washington County, but also from other parts of Pennsylvania along with West Virginia and Ohio. According to Pennsylvania Fire Commissioner Tim Solobay, “There’s nothing like it outside of Texas”…
In February MDN told you about a deal signed by a hospital in Potter County, PA to lease 742.9 acres of hospital-owned land to JKLM Energy to drill Utica Shale wells (see 
An update on a royalty lawsuit we first reported in July. Two Butler County, PA landowners with a combined 245.7 acres of land leased to (and drilled by) XTO Energy have sued XTO claiming the company is breaking the lease agreement by paying royalties below 1/8 of what XTO receives in revenue for the gas (see 
The Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will be in Pittsburgh tomorrow to conduct a hearing into how they can illegally regulate oil and gas drilling through the back door of so-called “fugitive” methane emissions, which they claim are insanely high in shale plays like the Marcellus/Utica (
The Christ-less editorial board of the Scranton Times-Tribune has all of a sudden gotten the Catholic religion. The anti-drilling Dems who run the Times-Tribune are normally religion-free–but since Pope Francis visited Philly and mouthed words that he believes in the myth of man-made global warming, Pope Francis (regardless of his stance on issues like abortion) is the new patron saint of the Times-Tribune. They go so far in their latest editorial as to link Pope Francis and another Democrat saint–John Quigley, the PennFuture Secretary of the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection…
MDN recently received a tip from a reader who said that WPX Energy, which has been exiting the Marcellus for more than year, is plugging and abandoning its wells in Cook Township (Westmoreland County), PA. We asked WPX about it and got the scoop about what’s happening with WPX in southwestern and central PA…
Party time! Yesterday PennEast Pipeline filed their full, official application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for permission to commence building their $1 billion, 118-mile, 36-inch diameter pipeline that will deliver approximately 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day from the Marcellus gas fields of northeastern PA to locations in southeastern PA and across the border to Trenton, NJ. The long-term benefits to the pipeline are many–lower natural gas and electricity costs for millions of consumers. In addition, during construction the pipeline will generate an estimated $1.6 billion of economic impact during design and construction alone, supporting approximately 12,160 jobs and an associated $740 million in wages. This is good news for all Pennsylvanians and New Jerseyites. Of course anti-fossil fuel nutters also issued an angry press release claiming the PennEast Pipeline will do “irreparable harm” if built…
THE Delaware Riverkeeper, Maya van Rossum, and a bunch of her anti-fossil fuel pals delivered a letter on Wednesday to America’s most liberal governor, PA Gov. Tom Wolf, asking him to immediately suspend all further Marcellus drilling in the state and while he’s at it, stop building any new pipelines. They also “demand” (their words) that Wolf shut down his Pipeline Infrastructure Task Force which he created back in May (see 
The PennFuture Secretary of the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection, John Quigley, continues to promote a hard-left agenda inside a once-great agency. Any time a Democrat like Quigley pairs the word “justice” with another word, like “environmental”, you know it’s a bad idea. Quigley is promoting the concept of creating an “office of environmental justice” within the DEP. What does that even mean? Is Quigley implying we currently have environmental “injustice” running rampant through the Commonwealth? Quigley also wants to use revenue raised from an obscenely high severance tax on Marcellus Shale drilling to fund more DEP inspectors to hang out at drill pads. Must be Quigley didn’t get the memo from Wolf that ALL of the severance tax money, if Wolf is lucky enough to get such a tax passed (very much in doubt), has already been promised in a quid pro quo agreement to teachers’ unions that helped get him elected…
Halliburton, the second largest oilfield services company in the world and a major presence in northeast drilling, performed a self audit of their 80,000+ employees and found that just over 1,000 (1.4%) of their employees were eligible for overtime but didn’t receive it. Some of those workers are in Pennsylvania Marcellus–39 of them in fact, who are owed a collective $800,000 in back wages. Halliburton turned themselves in to the U.S. Dept. of Labor, admitting the mistake and offering to make it right. The company reached an agreement with the DOL to pay $18,293,557 to 1,016 employees nationwide for uncompensated overtime, one of the biggest such cases “in recent years” according to the DOL…
At last week’s Shale Insight conference, MDN editor Jim Willis sat in on a few of the main sessions. One of those sessions was the opener on Wednesday–a panel discussion moderated by the inimitable and always interesting Michael Krancer, a partner at the Philadelphia-based Blank Rome law firm and formerly the Secretary of the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection during Tom Cobett’s administration. The panel discussion was titled “Philadelphia – The New Northeast Energy Hub” and featured an all-star lineup: Joe Colella, senior VP at Sunoco Logistics; Phil Rinaldi, Chairman and CEO at Philadelphia Energy Solutions; and John Walsh, President and CEO of UGI Corporation. Mike Krancer kicked off the session with a bold statement: He believes Philly will rival and soon pass Houston, Texas as the dominant energy hub in the United States…