Northeastern PA Counties Explore Alliance to Pass Royalty Reform
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 (see our list of stories here). In a nutshell, landowners say Chesapeake Energy and some other drillers are taking post-production deductions out of landowners’ royalty checks, resulting in royalty payments far below 12.5%. In some cases landowners are receiving bills for money owed to the driller–after the driller pulled the gas out of the ground! Who in their right minds leases land for drilling so they can PAY the driller! It is an outrage and landowners want it stopped. Drillers, on the other hand, say you can’t just change contracts after they’ve been signed, punishing the entire industry for the bad actions of a few. Drillers say the proper response is for landowners to sue the bad apples. Frankly, it’s all a mess. The new news is that landowners from Bradford and several other northeastern PA counties, tired of being outmaneuvered by drillers, are actively talking about forming an alliance to try and garner enough support in Harrisburg to get a bill like HB 1391 passed this year…
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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 
Why doesn’t it surprise us that a Republican-in-Name-Only (RINO) State Senator from the 6th District (Bucks County, Philadelphia suburbs) is not only in favor of, but sponsoring a bill to levy a Marcellus-killing severance tax? PA State Senator Robert “Tommy” Tomlinson, an establishment lifer who has been in the state legislature since 1991 (first as a Representative, later as a Senator), sent around a “Co-Sponsorship Memoranda” yesterday asking Democrats, and along with any suckers from the Republican Party, to co-sponsor a bill he plans to introduce calling for a new severance tax on Marcellus drilling. Tommy wants to tax Marcellus drilling an extra 5%, on top of the existing impact fee, which is a severance tax under a different name, to give the money to (you guessed it) teachers unions. Tommy wants transfer millions of dollars out of the pockets of landowners and drillers and into the sinkhole of the failing “unfunded” pension system for state workers and teachers. The instantaneous effect of Tommy’s tax would be to kill all drilling in the state, which apparently doesn’t bother Tommy in the least…
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…
Some 200 leftist/radical bought-and-paid-for “protesters” (paid by Big Green groups) “rallied” in downtown Philadelphia yesterday in front of both of PA’s U.S. Senate office (Bob Casey, total jerk and Democrat hack, and Pat Toomey, marginal Republican). They were protesting President-elect Trump’s picks to run the EPA, Dept. of Energy and Dept. of Interior–calling them “climate deniers.” This is part of a national campaign paid for by radical environmental groups, like 350.org and the Sierra Club, groups totally invested in the theory that mankind is causing the earth to catastrophically heat up–even though the temperature record doesn’t back up the theory. Holding silly banners like “NO CLIMATE DENIAL CABINET” they paraded around, collected their paychecks, 
Several townships in the Philadelphia orbit appear to be colluding with each other and with the Philadelphia-based Clean Air Council in passing nearly identical resolutions opposing the Mariner East 2 natural gas liquids pipeline. Eight townships or boroughs along or “close to” (meaning not along) the route in Delaware and Chester counties have published resolutions or proclamations badmouthing the project. The municipalities include: Edgmont, West Goshen, Thornbury, Middletown, Westtown, Rose Valley, Swarthmore and Media. Some of the self-incriminating evidence for collusion comes from an admission by one of them: “The community statements are similar to each other because of consultation between their leaders.” And this, from the odious Clean Air Council: “Alex Bomstein, a lawyer with the environmental group Clean Air Council, said that while there are other local campaign such as those in Lebanon and Huntingdon Counties, the efforts in Delaware and Chester Counties are more ‘developed’ in the Philadelphia suburbs. ‘There are more people organizing than elsewhere,’ he said, probably because of a greater population density closer to Philadelphia.” Why would the StateImpact Pennsylvania propagandist quote the CAC in the same article as the colluding towns, unless they were somehow tied together?…