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FERC Chairman Says Court “Erred” in Vacating Transco REAE Cert
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision in late July vacating (nullifying) the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s approval of Transco’s Regional Energy Access Expansion (REAE) project to bring gas from Pennsylvania to New Jersey and Maryland (see DC Circuit Libs Reverse FERC Approval of Transco Northeast Expansion). At a FERC open meeting yesterday, FERC Chairman Willie Phillips (a Democrat!) said, “I want to make clear that I think the court erred in vacating our authorization.” However, Phillips said that decision and one other will force FERC to rethink how it reviews gas infrastructure projects moving forward.
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WhiteHawk Energy, headquartered in Philadelphia and owning mineral and royalty interests for over 1 million gross unit acres with over 3,400 producing horizontal shale wells between the Marcellus and the Haynesville, announced yesterday the acquisition of additional Marcellus Shale natural gas mineral and royalty assets for an undisclosed amount. The deal added 435,000 gross unit acres across southwestern Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia. 
Yesterday, Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub (ARCH2) leadership team members presented an update on the ARCH2 initiative and its current status. Among the big news from the event was that ARCH2 is looking “for up to three” new projects that would be built in southwestern Pennsylvania, West Virginia, or eastern Ohio as part of the ARCH2 initiative. The new projects would replace several that are no longer part of ARCH2. 
Here’s a new concept for some (including us): Have you ever heard about the “heat content” of energy like natural gas? Heat content is the amount of heat energy available to be released by the transformation or use of a specified physical unit of an energy form, like how much heat a cubic foot of natural gas produces when burned. Depending on where you go, the heat content of natural gas varies. A recent analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows that Texas has some of the lowest heat content, and West Virginia has some of the highest. 
Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Senate approved Senate Bill (SB) 1058 that would repeal the state’s participation in the so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), an illegal carbon tax enacted via executive order by then Gov. Tom Wolf in 2019 (see 
The radicalized Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), in partnership with the equally radicalized Moms Clean Air Force (MCAF), is joining forces with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and (very oddly) McGill University, which is located in Montreal, Quebec (Canada) to launch a project to identify and “facilitate remediation of” orphan and abandoned oil and gas wells across Western Pennsylvania. The group will fly specially outfitted drones about 100 feet above ground in Clarion, Venango, and McKean counties in western PA to try and identify and catalog orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells. 
In yet another attempt to deflect attention away from Kamala Harris’ extreme position on fracking (she wanted to ban it completely everywhere in 2019), mainstream news continues to publish stories on other Pennsylvania energy topics. For example, yesterday, the New York Times published a story with this headline: “Big Energy Issue in Pennsylvania Is Low Natural Gas Prices. Not Fracking.” We forced ourselves to read it all the way through. We “took one for the team,” so you won’t have to. The story started out fine and made some legitimate points. The NYT article is (more or less) right as far as it goes. The problem is that the article doesn’t go far enough. It stops with only half of the story told. Here at MDN, we tell you the whole story—all of the facts, not just some of the facts. 
Hidden in last Friday’s weekly Baker Hughes official rig count is a big story happening in the Marcellus/Utica. From the 30,000-foot level, Friday’s latest rig count report appeared just fine. The national rig count, which counts all oil and gas rigs, added an astonishing eight rigs to the count after languishing for months — the biggest weekly gain in a year. Very nice. The M-U count maintained at 33, down from a few weeks ago, but still not completely terrible. But then you open the hood and look at the engine, and something startling happens. Pennsylvania is losing rigs, bleeding rigs, like crazy—four rigs gone in the last two weeks. And West Virginia is gaining those lost rigs. Typically, there’s no one answer as to why these things happen. Our best guess is that Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), coming online from the northern panhandle of WV to southern Virginia, carrying natgas to markets outside the immediate region for higher prices, has much to do with this realignment.
We spotted a report about an aboveground pipeline that flows shale wastewater that sprung a leak and released an estimated 12,600 gallons of brine (salty water from deep below the surface) on the ground in Gilmore Township, Greene County, PA. The pipeline is owned by EQM Gathering, another name for Equitrans Midstream, which is now owned by EQT. The leaking pipeline connects to the Trust Well Site owned by EQT. It sure sounds like a serious spill (12,600 gallons) with the potential to contaminate local water supplies—until you dig into the state Dept. of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) report on the incident. 
A couple of interesting developments with the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), which, unlike its dysfunctional cousin, the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), the SRBC continues to allow water withdrawals to supply water for shale fracking in northeastern Pennsylvania. The first development is that over the weekend (on Saturday), the SRBC Hydrologic Conditions Monitor showed low stream flows in some areas that triggered water withdrawal restrictions for water users, including seven shale gas water withdrawal locations (most of them for driller Repsol). The other development is that two days earlier, on Thursday, the SRBC approved new water withdrawal requests for 22 new projects, including eight from shale drillers! 
The Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) wants to spend some of the $214+ million it’s receiving from the federal government’s Phase 1 & 2 program to plug orphaned conventional oil and gas wells on a research project to determine the potential health impacts of living near such wells. You may recall the flawed (totally fake) “research” conducted by the University of Pittsburgh in 2023 that purported to show a connection between shale drilling and childhood cancer clusters (see 
For the week of Sept. 2 – 8, 14 permits were issued to drill new shale wells in Marcellus/Utica, less than half the previous week’s 32. The Keystone State (PA) had 13 new permits. PA’s top recipient was Seneca Resources, with six permits issued in Tioga County. Range Resources was #2 with four permits for Lycoming County. Chesapeake Energy had two permits in Bradford County, and Inflection Energy had a single new permit in Lycoming County. 
According to Pennsylvania regulation 25 Pa. Code § 78a.122(b)(6)(iv), a drilling company must provide a list of the chemicals intentionally added to the stimulation [fracking] fluid by name and chemical abstract service (CAS) number in a Completion Report. The PA Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) says Apex Energy failed to provide that information on its reports for 37 shale wells in Westmoreland County drilled between March 20, 2018, and February 17, 2024. The DEP issued a NOV (Notice of Violation) to Apex on Sept. 9.