Martians Give Conservative British MP a Tour of PA Fracking
The United Kingdom (as in Merry Old England) is finally, seriously, considering permits to allow shale fracking in the country. It’s taken a long time, and it’s certainly not a done deal yet. But it’s getting much closer. A Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) from a district in the north of England likely to see shale drilling when/if it happens recently traveled 3,500 miles to visit Pennsylvania, to see the effects of shale drilling firsthand. We applaud the MP’s efforts to see it up close. Unfortunately, Conservatives in the UK are more like RINOs here–there really aren’t all that many true conservatives in the socialistic UK. So when our “Conservative” MP came calling, one of the “expert” groups he took a tour with was the nutty Martians, a small group of anti-drillers in Butler County called the Mars Parent Group (see MDN’s list of Martian stories here). Incredibly, even after receiving a manure spreader full of lies from the Martians, our Conservative MP is still keeping an open mind about fracking back home…
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On Wednesday Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf got his wish to have an up or down vote on his latest high tax budget proposal and it went to down in flames (see 
It’s a miracle! Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf actually did something right–he signed Senate Bill (SB) 875 into law yesterday. You may recall on Tuesday we told you that the PA Senate and House had passed SB875 and sent it on to Wolf for his signature (see 
In January 2014, anti-drilling “researchers” jumped the gun at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Philadelphia by announcing “preliminary” results of research in which they claim they can show a connection between shale drilling and low birth weights in newborn babies in Pennsylvania (see 
In the end, it was PA Gov. Tom Wolf’s own Democrat Party House members that sunk his latest high tax budget proposal. Nine Dems voted against the Wolf budget, showing bipartisan support for defeating Wolf’s high taxes, including lack of support for a high severance tax. Every single Republican, even the RINOs, voted against Wolf’s unpopular budget proposal. Trying to spin his humiliating defeat as some sort of plus, Wolf said he was “encouraged” that “so many Democrats” actually voted yes for his budget. Talk about chutzpah. Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, R-Butler, has some big cojones–he equated Wolf with a thug trying to mug somebody, taking all of their money at gunpoint. Wow! It’s about time there was some frank talk about the bully Wolf has become in ten short months–and some push-back against it. Time for Republicans to pass a budget and get a few of those Dems to go along and override a Wolf veto. Time to govern without Wolf if he refuses to do his job…
Oilfield service giant Baker Hughes released their venerable monthly rotary rig count report yesterday for September 2015. After posting gains in the overall land-based U.S. rig count number for two straight months in July and August, the September numbers dropped like a rock. September U.S. active land-based rigs averaged 848, down 35 from the average of 883 in August and down 18 from July’s average of 866. Rig counts for the Marcellus/Utica also continued to drop, showing another four rigs were idled during September across the combined PA/OH/WV. It’s getting bloody out there…
Once again PA Gov. Tom Wolf is proving himself to be a partisan hack, and certainly not up to the job the good people of Pennsylvania elected him to do. He’s a typical tax and spend liberal (voted the most liberal governor in America by the non-partisan InsideGov, see 
Shell is currently spending an undisclosed amount of money (millions of dollars) to build a bridge to a site they now own where they may one day build a $2-$3 billion ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, PA (see 
As a general rule, professional actors are some of the most clueless people on the planet. Mark Ruffalo, one of the most clueless of the clueless, was honored at a Pennsylvania college because of it. Ruffalo was honored by Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA (near Harrisburg) with the Sam Rose ’58 and Julie Walters Prize for his environmental cluelessism, er, a, activism. Hey, Ruffalo does a decent job with acting (we enjoy the Avengers movies)–we’ll grant him that. But have you ever noticed the lights are all on with Ruffalo–but nobody’s actually home? Anywho, the awarded Ruffalo, who calls himself “an accidental environmentalist,” will make a trip to Harrisburg today to deliver a letter from “100 organizations” and “25,000 concerned citizens” to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf. The letter will ask Wolf to immediately enact a fracking moratorium in the state. What…radical? No way that will ever happen? Pipe dream? You may have forgetten (but we didn’t) that the Pennsylvania State Democrat Party, before they nominated Wolf to be their leader, adopted an official plank in the party platform calling for the same identical thing (see 
It’s time to enter the 2016 Northeast Oil & Gas Awards contest! As in previous years, Marcellus Drilling News is pleased to promote the annual Oil & Gas Awards for the northeast, held each year in Pittsburgh. The 2016 event will be held on March 30 and nominations for 25 different categories are now open (see the list below). It costs nothing to nominate your own company–or someone else’s company–for an award. Finalists for each award are asked to sponsor a table at a gala ball/event (that’s how the event is paid for). It’s time to take a shot at having worthy companies–yours or someone else’s–recognized for the good work done in our beloved industry…
This week should tell us a lot about the future of a severance tax in Pennsylvania–at least the near-term (this year) future. PA Gov. Tom Wolf, a failed governor who’s only been in office for 10 months, is demanding a high severance tax on top of an already high impact fee (the equivalent of a severance tax) in order to pay back teachers’ unions for voting him into office. He’s playing a dangerous game of chicken–dangerous for education, dangerous for all of the agencies without money to operate, dangerous for every citizen in the Commonwealth. Today Wolf will float yet another budget calling for a high severance tax and it will get voted on tomorrow. Prospects for Wolf passing his budget, even though he’s been lobbying RINOs in the House and Senate (bribing them with political promises), don’t look good. In an act of supreme hubris, Wolf says if he loses this vote, Pennsylvania loses. We say it’s the opposite…
In June MDN told you about an idea “whose time has come”–legislation in Pennsylvania that will allow drillers to use acid mine water (AMW) from abandoned coal mines as fracking fluid, reducing the need for using fresh water sources (see 
It appears to us that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has just made it harder for drillers and pipeline companies operating in Pennsylvania to do their job–although we’re not 100% sure. Last week the USACE issued a public notice about revisions to the Pennsylvania State Programmatic General Permit – 4 (PASPGP-4). According to the legal beagles at Babst Calland, “PASPGP-4 authorizes the discharge of dredged or fill materials and the placement of temporary or permanent structures that result in impacts to one acre or less of waters of the United States, including jurisdictional wetlands.” The USACE has added more threatened and endangered species, as listed on the Pennsylvania Natural Diversity Inventory (PNDI), to the PASPGP-4, meaning there’s more bats and bugs and other critters drillers and pipeliners must avoid when moving earth and cutting down trees. At least that’s what we think is happening. The USACE says it’s “streamlining” the review process. Looks to us like what they’re doing is adding more hoops the oil and gas industry must jump through…
Get this: The Obama administration has made a $730,000 grant to the Pittsburgh Region Clean Cities (PRCC) organization to study how to convert boats to operate more efficiently and pollute the environment less. Most boats today burn a nasty, filthy, rotten fossil fuel called diesel. Belches out all sorts of “pollutants” including carbon dioxide. Obamadroids want to clean up Mother Earth and need to figure out ways to do it. But sticking a windmill or a solar panel on a boat doesn’t work very well (Obama’s already tried it). So for the administration that’s given us the Clean Power Plan that tries to eliminate both coal and natural gas, we have a grant to convert a tugboat from burning diesel to…burning natural gas. Yep. Even Obamadroids have to admit you can power boats with solar and wind–so they’ve given $730,000 to the PRCC to run an experiment in converting a tugboat burning diesel into burning clean, abundant and cheap natural gas. Perhaps the smartest thing Obama has ever done!…
Yes, it takes years from the first announcement of a new pipeline project until it’s done and “in service.” In October 2012 MDN told you about a new project from then NiSource and it’s Columbia Pipeline subsidiary called the East Side Expansion (see