Video: DEP Acting Sec McDonnell Wants to Recycle Article 78 Regs
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 Smoking Gun: Copy of the Email that Got John Quigley Fired). Quigley, formerly from the anti-drilling PennFuture organization, was a rigid ideologue with a thin skin–someone who didn’t like his extreme views being challenged. Pat McDonnell, on the other hand, has been with the DEP on-and-off for the past 20 years. He’s a lifer. And it appears he’s not nearly as rigid as Quigley was. Cusick sat McDonnell down for a brief interview (watch it below). Among her questions: What about conventional Article 78 drilling regs? Is it back to the drawing board? According to McDonnell, the answer to that is “no.” He plans to dust off the rebuffed Article 78 drilling regs developed over the past five years and try to get a form of them palatable enough for the drilling industry to swallow…
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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 
A small group of ignorant children (look the photo) preened and pretended to actually know something when they marched outside of the Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) refinery in South Philly where PES would like to expand by leasing an extra 200 acres at the Southport facility. The children blocked traffic causing a backup, making drivers unhappy. The kids also prevented trucks from entering and exiting the facility–for about 10 minutes. Philly police watched and did nothing. Sycophantic media (StateImpact) claimed there were “around 100” but a picture of the event shows nine (that we can see), none of whom appear to be old enough to drink beer. PES is pushing the concept of making Philadelphia an “energy hub” and they (PES) want to ship Marcellus Shale gas from the Southport facility location after piping it there from other parts of PA. A number of people are bidding on the property and it’s not at all a foregone conclusion that PES will get it (see 
Although he still wants to tax the Marcellus Shale industry out of his state, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (with the dubious title of “most liberal governor in the U.S.,” see 
In June Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf was forced to accept half a loaf–he agreed to reject new drilling regulations for the conventional drilling industry in the state, if lawmakers would allow his administration’s rework of shale drilling regulations to take effect (see 
You’ve heard of “whitewashing” before. How about “title washing?” No, we hadn’t either. But this funny sounding practice has a great deal to do with mineral rights in Pennsylvania, with possible implications for landowners and drillers. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a 5-0 ruling last week that upholds the practice of title washing in the Keystone State. What in the world is it, and how does it affect landowners and drillers? In the case of Herder Spring Hunting Club v. Keller there had been a tax sale in 1935 for a property in Centre County, PA where the mineral rights had previously been separated. Prior to 1948 if mineral rights that had been separated were not properly recorded (it was incumbent on the owner of the subsurface rights to ensure the sale was recorded at the assessor’s office), and the surface land was later sold, both the mineral rights (subsurface) and the surface land became part of the sale. That, in essence, was title washing. After 1948 a law prevented this from happening, so such cases only apply to land sold before 1948. The legal beagles at Babst Calland have a good overview of what the practice of title washing is, and how the Court’s decision affects Pennsylvanians. We also have a copy of the decision embedded below…