Court Rejects Dela. Riverkeeper Case Against PA DEP Pipe Approval
Time to do a happy dance. THE (arrogant) Delaware Riverkeeper has lost yet another court case–one of many such cases they continuously file to stop any fossil fuel-related project in the northeast. In March MDN told you that THE Delaware Riverkeeper had sued the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, challenging their decision to approve the Williams Transco Pipeline’s Leidy Southeast Expansion from PA to New York City (see Dela. Riverkeeper Sues FERC Again – Over Leidy Pipeline Expansion). Riverkeeper wanted to hedge its bets–so at some point (not sure when) they also sued the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Riverkeeper’s philosophical clones at the New Jersey Conservation Foundation sued the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) claiming the agencies acted “arbitrarily or capriciously” in granting state permits for the Leidy Southeast Expansion project. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit this week slapped down Riverkeeper and their clones in NJ, saying the states were well within their rights to grant those permits, and they did nothing wrong…
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Last week MDN highlighted and shared with you a top notch new report just issued by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection–the PA Oil and Gas Annual Report for 2015 (see 
Guess who’s back with a case now before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court? Yep, the odious nutters from Big Green Groups PennFuture, THE (arrogant) Delaware Riverkeeper, and the Peters Township gang. You may recall we reported last September of the humiliating defeat suffered by these groups in the “Gorsline” case (see 
Last week MDN reported on National Fuel Gas Company’s quarterly recently-filed quarterly report (see 
On Tuesday MDN brought you what we thought was the very first Annual Oil and Gas Annual Report from the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (see 
Yesterday the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued what we believe is the first-ever Oil and Gas Annual Report, covering last year (2015). We’ve never seen one of these reports before (full copy below). [UPDATE: MDN subscriber Michele W. wrote to tell us the DEP has been producing annual o&g reports since 2013. Thanks Michele!] Our hat is off to the DEP. This is an EXCELLENT report! It’s chock full of very cool graphs and tables and useful information–in particular about the unconventional (shale) drilling industry in the state, but also about the conventional oil and gas industry in PA. At a very high level, we learn that total production of natural gas in PA for 2015 was 4.6 trillion cubic feet (Tcf), versus 4.05 Tcf in 2014–and that’s with less drilling! Most of the production came from the Marcellus Shale layer, but the Utica and Point Pleasant formations are showing a noticeable uptick in production. Among the many charts and graphs is a table showing the Top 25 producers of natgas in the state (see our separate post today on that); the number of shale and conventional well permits issued, by year; number of permits issued by county in 2015 (and a table with the Top 5 counties); number of wells drilled by year for both shale and conventional; number of wells drilled by county in 2015; the list goes on! Take time to read through this fascinating report about the most productive natural gas shale play in the second highest-producing natgas state in the country…
Below is a chart from the just-released 2015 Oil and Gas Annual Report for Pennsylvania, from the state’s Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP). The report is full of great charts and graphs and useful details about both the shale and conventional drilling industry in the state (see today’s lead story, PA Releases 2015 Oil & Gas Annual Report (Very Cool)). It’s hard for us to select a favorite chart/graph from the report, there’s so many of them! However, the table below is on the short list. It is a table showing the Top 25 natural gas producers, along with the amount of natgas produced, for 2015. It may or may not surprise you to learn that the #1 natgas producer in PA for 2015 was….Chesapeake Energy! It certainly didn’t surprise us to see the company in the #2 slot–Cabot Oil & Gas. Here’s the full table…
StateImpact Pennsylvania is populated with partisan hacks who pretend to be reporters. One of them is Marie Cusick (who has a degree in political science, not journalism). We’ve often pointed out the extreme left-tilting political bias in StateImpact’s “articles” (i.e. propaganda). What really galls is that taxpayers help fund it, since StateImpact is a project of the Public Broadcasting Service. We hate having our tax money fund such skewed reporting. But we digress. Yesterday Marie Cusick did an interview with the Acting Secretary of the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), Pat McDonnell. You may recall that Pat’s predecessor, John Quigley, was fired for colluding with Big Green groups and using a private email address to do it (see 
The legal beagles at global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright have done us all a huge favor. Researchers have just issued a quarterly legislative action update for the second quarter of 2016 looking at previously laws acted upon, and new laws introduced, affecting the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. The “Quarterly legislative action update: Marcellus and Utica shale region” (full copy below) begins with a quick listing by state for existing or new laws introduced, with descriptions for each bill/law. This is, in one place, pretty much everything you need to know about what new laws (i.e. regulations) are coming down the pike that will affect the Marcellus and Utica Shale drilling industry…
In May MDN highlighted news that Penn State University had set up a seismic monitoring system throughout Pennsylvania to track earthquakes in the Keystone State (see 
MDN sent an email to our list of daily headline subscribers last week (below). This is a quick reminder that 
Last August MDN told you about a lawsuit brought by a group of left coast radicalized children who want to force the federal government to become communist and “force action” on mythical climate change (see 
National Fuel Gas (NFG), the Buffalo-based utility giant with both a drilling subsidiary (Seneca Resources) and a midstream/pipeline subsidiary (Empire Pipeline) filed an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in March 2015 for a pipeline project they call Northern Access 2016 (later renamed to simply Northern Access Project, dropping the “2016” part). The $455 million project includes building 97 miles of new pipeline along a power line corridor from northwestern Pennsylvania up to Erie County, NY. The project also calls for 3 miles of new pipeline further up, in Niagara County, along with a new compressor station in the Town of Pendleton (see