PA Gov Wolf Said He May Ask NY Gov Cuomo to OK Constitution Pipe
One of the interesting tidbits to come out of yesterday’s first day of the Shale Insight conference in Pittsburgh was an off-the-cuff remark from Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s special assistant for infrastructure, Yesenia Bane, who said that Gov. Wolf is “willing to talk” with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to ask him to approve the Williams Constitution Pipeline project in the Empire State. Bane said Wolf has met with Williams and other stakeholders in the Constitution project, and apparently Wolf was impressed enough that he’s willing to add his own voice to those calling for an approval of the Constitution. Democrat on Democrat. Mano a mano. Should be interesting, if Wolf ever gets up the nerve to do it…
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The Pennsylvania Dept. of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) used to, once upon a time, lease a small fraction of the land under its oversight to allow Marcellus Shale drilling. And like any private landowner, the DCNR received bonus payments when leasing, and royalties when the gas began to flow. In fact, when Marcellus drilling had hit its peak in 2013, the DCNR received almost enough just from bonuses and royalties they were nearly self-funding (see 
This story is unbelievable on so many levels. A pointy-headed liberal who cloisters himself inside the insular Beltway of Washington, DC made a trip to Pittsburgh last week to talk to a small class of 70 students at Carnegie Mellon University. In this talk the lib proclaimed that the “incentives” provided by PA to Shell to lure a cracker plant to the state are, essentially, monies the state didn’t have to spend and a burden to the taxpayers of PA because Ohio and West Virginia may also reap some of the benefits of the cracker (without “paying” for it). The lib’s operating assumption is that 100% of everyone’s money belongs to the all-knowing government–including money made by big, evil corporations like Shell. He further states that by granting a few exemptions on taxes to Shell, PA is taking money out of the pockets of common folk. His philosophy and assumptions are so twisted it’s beyond belief. What’s more twisted is that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote a major story about the talk–as if it’s news…
For some time now MDN has highlighted the ongoing internal division among the ranks between Pennsylvania landowners and drillers over the issue of royalty checks. PA landowners are supporting House Bill (HB) 1391 which would guarantee landowners receive a minimum 12.5% royalty check regardless of post-production costs (see 
Channeling our inner Joan Rivers: Can we talk? It hurts when a good friend publicly criticizes you. It feels like you’ve been stabbed in the back. Perhaps a case of public criticism is one of the reasons for the developing rancor (we call it a civil war) between landowners and the Marcellus industry in Pennsylvania. Landowners are upset that their royalty checks are, in some cases, pennies–as in less than one dollar. Drillers claim that super low prices they receive for the gas are to blame–that nobody is making money right now. Landowners say that drillers (e.g. Chesapeake Energy) are deducting post-production costs that they shouldn’t be allowed to deduct, resulting in worthless royalty checks. For a number of years landowners in Pennsylvania have supported legislation to force drillers to pay a minimum 12.5% royalty, which is stipulated under a 1979 law. Drillers say post-production costs are written into many contracts and if it’s there, landowners must live by the contract. It’s turning into a mess. We’ve covered it extensively (
What happens when you put a virulent anti-driller in charge of a state’s forestry service, a state that previously had a small, safe, healthy program to allow some shale drilling, giving taxpayers a break with a source of new revenue? Of course the anti-driller immediately tries to quash any more new drilling efforts. And that’s just what has happened with former PennFuture president and current Secretary of the PA Dept. of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR), Cindy Dunn. We called for her firing back in June when she was caught using–we’d say misappropriating–taxpayer money to send her staff to Big Green reeducation events (see 
Yesterday MDN reported the story that Dominion Transmission has decided to lock out union members from working at their jobs in Dominion installations over a contract dispute (see 
Residents in Wilmot Township (Bradford County), PA are mad as hell over shorted royalty checks–and they aren’t taking it anymore. Yesterday Wilmot Township’s three supervisors passed a resolution demanding, “production be discontinued from wells where landowners are having their royalty checks diminished to nothing or nearly nothing.” That is, they want to block natural gas production from existing shale wells drilled in a town smack in the middle of one of the most-drilled places in Pennsylvania. We’ve long chronicled the fight between landowners and some (certainly not all) drillers who are screwing them out of royalty payments by claiming inflated post-production costs. The issue first came to prominence with claims by landowners signed with Chesapeake Energy, who claimed Chessy had cut a sweetheart deal with its former midstream company (Access Midstream) whereby Access bumped up its charges for piping gas which Chesapeake claimed as an expense and deducted from royalty checks, and then Access turned around and invested big money into the old mothership company (see 
We scored a copy of a refreshingly honest (blunt) assessment of the Marcellus industry in Pennsylvania. The letter was written by the Marcellus Shale Coalition’s vice president of government affairs, James Welty. It’s dated August 29 and was written and sent to all Pennsylvania legislators in both the House and Senate. The legislators have been enjoying themselves on summer holiday break and are now returning to work, with just a couple of weeks left in the legislative session. The PA House is in session for 2 1/2 more weeks and the Senate for 1 1/2 weeks (final day is Nov. 15 for each). There’s not much time left to handle the people’s business in 2016. Welty’s letter to the legislators is a frank assessment of the current down market faced by PA’s shale drillers. Welty tells lawmakers that recently adopted Article 78a rules will mean drillers spend an additional $2 million per well to drill–a budget buster for many drillers. He also says PA has the highest effective tax rate on drilling in the country at 12.3%. Although PA doesn’t call it a severance tax, it essentially is a severance tax and costs more than any other oil and gas state, contrary to the lies by Democrats who lust for more money to give away. Give this frank assessment of our beloved industry a read–it’s worth your time to see how the industry characterizes the current landscape in PA…