FERC Delays PennEast Pipe 3rd Time, PennEast Spins as ‘Good News’
PennEast Pipeline is a very important $1 billion, 118-mile, primarily 36-inch pipeline that will get built from Dallas (Luzerne County), PA to Transco’s pipeline interconnection near Pennington (Mercer County), NJ. It will feed local utilities and power generation plants along its route. In April 2016 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which oversees permitting for the pipeline, told PennEast the agency would extend the amount of time they are taking until December 2016, rather than the original target of August, to complete their environmental review (see PennEast Spins FERC Delay as a Good Thing – Optimism or Denial?). It was (for us) a small red flag. Hey, it happens. Projects get delayed because regulatory agencies get bogged down. But then it happened again: FERC told PennEast they would once again move the goal posts and delay the final environmental review from December 2016 to February 2017 (see FERC Delays PennEast Pipeline Final Review – Again). Hmmm. Bigger red flag. Now FERC is doing it for a third time, which is a huge red flag in our book. FERC issued a statement on Friday to say the final environmental review now won’t happen until April. What’s going on? And why is PennEast once again spinning this as some sort of “good news”?…
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“As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.” (Proverbs 26:11, King James Version) We could think of no better way to convey the news that no less than three so-called Republicans from the Philadelphia area, and a plethora of Democrats, are in the process of introducing severance tax bills in the Pennsylvania State Legislature, once again. The bills range from assessing a 3.5% tax all the way up to 9%. We won’t repeat our many MANY arguments for why such a tax is just plain stupid. We’ll just share with you who (in the PA legislature) wants to steal money from landowners and drillers and give it to teachers’ unions…
One of the issues that isn’t going away is the demand by landowners in some Pennsylvania counties, like Bradford, for lawmakers in the state to pass a bill that guarantees them what they believe they are already guaranteed–a 12.5% minimum royalty, based on a 1979 law that states they should get such a royalty. We’ve extensively covered what we call a civil war between two parties who are otherwise friendly toward each other–landowners and shale drillers. Last year the issue came to a head with House Bill (HB) 1391 (
Make no mistake. When the Heinz Endowments, a left-leaning, big-moneyed nonprofit invests its money via grants into programs that have anything to do with shale drilling, it is for one purpose and one purpose only: to smear the reputation of fracking and to make oil and gas look bad. They fund all sorts of “research” efforts that mysteriously always come to the same conclusion: fracking is bad. Funny how that works. So it was with interest we noted they’ve purchased for themselves another academic researcher rather cheaply–just $48,000–with a mission to test water wells near fracking sites. The aim? To prove that fracking contaminates water wells. Which is the claim made by groups like Heinz for years–and has never been proven. Millions of wells fracked, with a small number where methane has migrated into those wells (a fixable condition). NEVER has there been chemical transmission from fracking into groundwater wells. But that doesn’t stop Heinz from trying to manufacture evidence. Here’s their latest effort…
In December, the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) unveiled new regulations to clamp down on methane emissions and other other air pollution that allegedly comes from shale drilling sites (see 
Here’s a story we admittedly don’t know much about, a story that kind of came out of left field. It may affect some shale drillers in southwest PA. Sometimes drillers want to lease and drill under coal mines. Since coal mines sink large holes in the ground, there are existing guidelines in place for how closely an oil/gas well can be drilled on or under a coal mine–guidelines put in place in 1957. As a result of legislation passed in 2011 called Act 2, a review was conducted to see if the standards for oil/gas drilling near coal mines might be modified–we’re assuming “relaxed,” allowing such drilling to happen in conditions not currently allowed. A column of rock called a pillar needs to be of a certain size/width in order for drilling to take place. An independent study to review the size of pillars, called “Gas Well Pillar Study Update, PO 4300311202 and 4300400813,” was completed in March 2016. The PA Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) recently completed its own review of that study (copy of the DEP review below) and has rejected changing existing 1957 standards for pillar dimensions. Yeah, kind of technical. Short version: DEP is keeping super-strict standards in place claiming it’s safer for coal miners, limiting options for shale drilling under some coal mines…
FirstEnergy, based in Akron, OH, is one of the nation’s largest investor-owned electric systems, serving customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and New York. FirstEnergy owns a variety of regulated and non-regulated power generation plants. In November the company announced it wants to sell six power generating plants in PA, four of them natural gas-fired plants (see 
In October 2014 the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) fined PA driller EQT $4.53 million for a leaky wastewater impoundment in Tioga County, PA (see 
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf is…what adjective can we use? Recalcitrant. Stubborn. Pigheaded. Stupid. Perhaps all of the above. Wolf is clearly in over his head and the most ineffective PA governor in more than a generation. When he assumed office in 2015, he floated a budget calling for a new 5% severance tax on the Marcellus industry–a tax which even his supporters admitted would be closer to 17% (see 
In July 2016 MDN told you about a smallish, but important pipeline project in the Delmarva Peninsula area, which includes most of Delaware and portions of Maryland and Virginia. Eastern Shore Natural Gas’ 2017 System Expansion project will bring new sources of natgas from an interconnection Eastern Shore has with the mighty TETCo (Texas Eastern Company) pipeline near Philadelphia (see 
Two radical Pennsylvania-based “environmental” groups are not exactly merging–but almost. One group is the radical PennFuture, which gave rise to such luminaries as John Quigley (fired as Sec. of the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection), John Hanger (left the state, former DEP Secretary, ran for governor last time, lost, supports legalizing pot), and Cindy Dunn (currently Secretary of Dept. of Conservation and Natural Resources). PennFuture is tax exempt, yet it routinely engages in political activity in violation of its IRS 501(c)(3) status. The other group is Conservation Voters of PA, a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization affiliated with a political action committee (PAC). The two groups are combining certain portions of their operations–“policy, advocacy, and legal resources”–in an attempt to “hold legislators accountable, mobilize voters, and shine a spotlight on candidates’ records on clean air, water and energy issues.” Our view is that their organizations’ membership and donations are dwindling and this is two failing organizations clinging to each other so they don’t slip beneath the waves into oblivion…