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Nat’l Rig Count Down 9 @ 578; Marcellus Even @ 25, Utica Down 3 @ 10
We’re catching up on two weeks of changes in the rig count, and wow! Things changed. And NOT in a good way. The national count lost nine rigs over the past two weeks, going from 587 on April 25 to 584 on May 2 and then down to 578 on May 9. But it was the Marcellus/Utica that caught our attention. Two weeks ago, for the May 2 Baker Hughes rig count, Ohio dropped three rigs in a single week, going from 12 on April 25 to nine on May 2. The Ohio count remained at nine on May 9. Consequently, the combined M-U count went from 38 two weeks ago to 35 and has remained at that level. Both Pennsylvania and West Virginia kept their same counts of 18 and 8, respectively. Read More “Nat’l Rig Count Down 9 @ 578; Marcellus Even @ 25, Utica Down 3 @ 10”
In January, MDN reported that the PJM Interconnection electrical grid operator, covering Pennsylvania (along with all or parts of 12 other states and the District of Columbia), had caved to the political demands of PA Gov. Josh Shapiro to artificially cap the prices of the next capacity auction scheduled for July 2025 (see 
Both conventional and unconventional (shale) drillers in Pennsylvania were required to submit a new annual report to the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) on December 10, 2023, detailing volatile organic compound (VOC) and methane emissions from their operations over the previous year. Shortly before that deadline, the DEP suspended the due date and set a new due date of June 1, 2024 (see 
Every three years, the Pennsylvania Dept of Environmental Protection (DEP) is required, by state law, to produce an update to the state’s so-called Climate Action Plan. The fact that they have such a plan boggles the mind—a plan to address global warming (the operative word being “global”) from one state. To be fair, many states and even large cities also have such plans. These plans are all arrogant nonsense. No entity, especially not a single state, can do a darned thing to affect the temperature of Mom Earth, but they pretend they can. And they use the existence of such plans as a manipulative political tool to force policy changes that inflict significant economic harm on their citizens, all in the name of saving the planet. The wackadoodle left has brainwashed our children into believing we’ll die if we don’t give up fossil fuel use. The DEP recently released its triennial “dump fossil fuels” update, and it’s as crazy as ever. 
Corporate welfare—the transfer of taxpayers’ money to businesses—is ugly, no matter if the money goes to large or small businesses. True to form, Pennsylvania’s Democrat Governor, Josh Shapiro, and his political operative at the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), “Acting” Secretary Jessica Shirley, yesterday launched a program to try and spread nearly half a billion dollars of taxpayer’s money from the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (Biden’s Green New Scam) to businesses large and small in the Keystone State. They euphemistically call the program RISE PA (Reducing Industrial Sector Emissions in Pennsylvania). It should be called “Spread Taxpayer Dollars to Buy Votes” (STD BV). 
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has found some willing accomplices among PA House Democrats to introduce six bills to implement Shapiro’s nutty, very partisan energy plan, called the “Lightning Plan.” Shapiro claims his so-called Lightning Plan is “a comprehensive, all-of-the-above energy plan to secure Pennsylvania’s energy future.” Except his plan puts the thumb of the government on the scales in favor of wind, solar, and hydro, and purposely disadvantages natural gas. Our observation: If it takes six (or more) bills to adopt his energy plan, something is seriously wrong. 
The rumor mill was right. In February, MDN brought you the juicy rumor that Olympus Energy, founded in 2012 as Huntley & Huntley Energy Exploration (a company that drills exclusively in the Pittsburgh suburbs), was being shopped for sale by its main financial backer (see 
In January, MDN reported that the PJM Interconnection electrical grid operator, covering Pennsylvania (along with all or parts of 12 other states and the District of Columbia), had caved to the political demands of PA Gov. Josh Shapiro to artificially cap the prices of the next capacity auction scheduled for July 2025 (see 
In early April, MDN brought you the exciting news that THE largest gas-fired power plant in the country, along with a MASSIVE data center complex, will be built at a former coal-fired power plant site in Indiana County, PA (see 
This is shameful. A Pennsylvania government agency, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), has aligned itself with an extreme leftwing organization to attack the PJM Interconnection electric grid in a bid to paper over the failed policies of PA Governor Josh Shapiro. In particular, so-called “Acting” Secretary of the DEP, Jessica Shirley, has proven she is no longer fit to lead the agency. The PA Senate should refuse to confirm her and bounce her out immediately. Shirley aligned herself with the radical left-wing organization called Evergreen Action to promote a sham/fake “report” by a well-known Democrat organization called Synapse Energy Economics (that works exclusively for left-wing groups) attacking PJM with false claims that it has a “broken” electric generation project approval process. 
Democrat politicians, like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, are predictable. Shapiro, Murphy, and other Dem governors in the PJM Interconnection electric grid region, which includes all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C., have ratcheted up their rhetoric blaming PJM for higher electricity prices, even though it is their own policies that are driving electric prices higher! Always blame someone else for your shortcomings; that’s their motto.