Shortline Railroad Wins Award for PA Marcellus Transload Facility
We can’t resist a good railroad story. The American Shortline and Regional Railroad Association (ASLRRA) has just recognized the Reading & Northern (R&N) Railroad, based in Port Clinton, PA, with one of the industry’s highest honors for marketing achievement. The ASLRRA recognized R&N for its development of a large Marcellus Shale transload facility in Tunkhannock (Wyoming County), PA. Opened in late 2021, the facility began full operations in early 2022 and handled over 2200 carloads of frack sand despite many challenges facing the Marcellus Shale region.
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One of two original “anchor” applicants in the billion-dollar hydrogen hub Hunger Games contest that was part of Pennsylvania’s application was Equinor (the Norwegian super major formerly known as Statoil). The Pittsburgh Business Times reports Equinor is now out and has been replaced by Mitsubishi Power, which (among other things) builds natural gas and hydrogen turbines to generate electricity. Why did Equinor leave? Is this proposal in trouble?
Last week MDN told you about the long-festering issue of building a shale wastewater injection well in Clara Township in Potter County, PA (see 
Two weeks ago, MDN did something we don’t often do: We broke news, providing an exclusive that Naceo’s plan to build a $6 billion gas-to-liquids (GTL) refinery on the site of a former coal mine in Newport Township and Nanticoke in Luzerne County, PA, is still alive and active (see 
Since 2015 we’ve reported on the case of Grant Township (Indiana County, PA), a town that passed an ordinance cooked up by the radical Big Green group Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) to try and block a state-approved injection well proposed by Pennsylvania General Energy (
As we reported back in February, the Biden EPA plans to allow private citizens to police oil wells and pipelines for methane leaks–meaning Big Green groups actually do the “policing” (see 
An issue that’s been festering for more than two years appears to be coming to a head in western Potter County, PA. In early 2021, Roulette Oil and Gas applied for a Class II Injection Well Permit to drill an injection well in Clara Township. The leftists from Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) immediately began to whisper the siren song of “home rule” into the ears of Clara’s residents (see 
During a routine inspection conducted earlier this week by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), an inspector discovered two of 12 Repsol wells on a pad in Susquehanna County were (gasp!) venting methane into the atmosphere. Call the methane police! There’s fugitive methane escaping! The wells were drilled in 2016. Apparently, there has been an ongoing issue with these two wells since 2017, when the DEP determined the wells have defective casing and/or cementing.
New shale permits issued for Mar. 27-Apr. 2 in the Marcellus/Utica dropped quite a bit from the prior week. There were 21 new permits issued in total last week, down from 32 in the prior week. Last week’s tally included 15 new permits for Pennsylvania, 6 new permits for Ohio, and no new permits in West Virginia. Last week the top receiver of new permits was Ascent Resources with 6 new permits, 5 in Jefferson County, OH, and 1 in Harrison County, OH. Chesapeake Energy took the #2 slot with 5 new permits in Bradford County, PA.
One of MDN’s favorite organizations is the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Landowner Alliance (POGLA), an organization representing oil, gas, mineral, and royalty owners throughout the Commonwealth of PA. POGLA will host a conference titled 
The Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGC) owns and manages more than 1.5 million acres of state game lands throughout the Commonwealth. The primary purpose of these lands is the management of habitat for wildlife and providing opportunities for lawful hunting and trapping. You might think PGC gets most of its revenue from hunting and trapping licenses and fees. You would be wrong. PGC allows shale drilling on some of its vast holdings, and leases and royalties generate about 7X the income for PGC than all other sources combined.
The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) published notice in the April 1 Pennsylvania Bulletin that it has denied a request by the Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association (PIOGA) to reconsider the agency’s plan to regulate small, completely safe natural gas gathering pipelines. We have the news of the PUC’s rejection, and what it means, along with an exclusive–the official response from PIOGA.
We have new evidence that so-called environmental groups, including a long list of anti-fracking groups in Pennsylvania, don’t really care about the environmental at all. They only care about the power to dictate to you what energy sources you can and cannot use–as a way of controlling you. Great strides have been made in capturing and sequestering (storing underground) carbon dioxide (CO2). These so-called environmental groups all say that CO2 is killing Mom Earth. Yet when real science is employed to control CO2 (to sequester it), they attempt to block it. Why is that?
In October 2021, Nacero announced a $6 billion gas-to-liquids (GTL) refinery to be built on the site of a former coal mine in Newport Township and Nanticoke in Luzerne County, PA (see 
If you support the Marcellus gas industry in Pennsylvania and you voted for Josh Shapiro for Governor last November, believing he doesn’t *really* want to kill the Marcellus industry via an obscene carbon tax (known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI), you were wrong. He does want to kill the industry. And a group of far-left groups are telling him he darned well better stay on the straight-and-narrow and keep RGGI alive. Or else…