Make or Break Week for PA Gov Wolf’s High Severance Tax
This week should tell us a lot about the future of a severance tax in Pennsylvania–at least the near-term (this year) future. PA Gov. Tom Wolf, a failed governor who’s only been in office for 10 months, is demanding a high severance tax on top of an already high impact fee (the equivalent of a severance tax) in order to pay back teachers’ unions for voting him into office. He’s playing a dangerous game of chicken–dangerous for education, dangerous for all of the agencies without money to operate, dangerous for every citizen in the Commonwealth. Today Wolf will float yet another budget calling for a high severance tax and it will get voted on tomorrow. Prospects for Wolf passing his budget, even though he’s been lobbying RINOs in the House and Senate (bribing them with political promises), don’t look good. In an act of supreme hubris, Wolf says if he loses this vote, Pennsylvania loses. We say it’s the opposite…
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In June MDN told you about an idea “whose time has come”–legislation in Pennsylvania that will allow drillers to use acid mine water (AMW) from abandoned coal mines as fracking fluid, reducing the need for using fresh water sources (see 
It appears to us that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has just made it harder for drillers and pipeline companies operating in Pennsylvania to do their job–although we’re not 100% sure. Last week the USACE issued a public notice about revisions to the Pennsylvania State Programmatic General Permit â 4 (PASPGP-4). According to the legal beagles at Babst Calland, “PASPGP-4 authorizes the discharge of dredged or fill materials and the placement of temporary or permanent structures that result in impacts to one acre or less of waters of the United States, including jurisdictional wetlands.” The USACE has added more threatened and endangered species, as listed on the Pennsylvania Natural Diversity Inventory (PNDI), to the PASPGP-4, meaning there’s more bats and bugs and other critters drillers and pipeliners must avoid when moving earth and cutting down trees. At least that’s what we think is happening. The USACE says it’s “streamlining” the review process. Looks to us like what they’re doing is adding more hoops the oil and gas industry must jump through…
Yes, it takes years from the first announcement of a new pipeline project until it’s done and “in service.” In October 2012 MDN told you about a new project from then NiSource and it’s Columbia Pipeline subsidiary called the East Side Expansion (see 
In March of this year, Syracuse University Professor Dr. Donald Siegel published the results of an extensive research study that found fracking of Marcellus Shale wells in Pennsylvania does not cause methane in water wells (see 
Last November, MDN told you about an innovative plan by PECO, a utility company based in Philadelphia serving some 500,000+ natural gas customers in southeastern PA, to allow customers to sign up for its natural gas service and spread the cost over 20 years (see 
Perhaps we now know the real reason why a group of anti-fossil fuel protesters decided to abandon their protest at the headquarters of PennEast Pipeline’s main sponsor, UGI. MDN told you yesterday how mainstream media in the New Jersey market covered a “massive” protest (of 35 people) who showed up at the Statehouse in Trenton during the day–with obviously nothing better to do–to protest against the PennEast Pipeline (see 
PA Gov. Tom Wolf has dropped all pretense of being a nice guy and has turned into a mafioso bully because he can’t get his own way. We understand. He made a back-room deal with teachers’ unions and they delivered him an election victory. He owes them and the only way he can pay them off is by taxing the Marcellus Shale industry into oblivion. Wolf’s latest tactic is to call the Republicans who won’t go along with his Marcellus-killing severance tax “the bad guys” and appeal to RINOs in the House and Senate–those like Rep. Gene DiGirolamo (from the Philly area)–those he calls “good Republican legislators”. Wolf plans to make the RINOs an offer they can’t refuse in order to support a severance tax. Will they bow to pressure from the don?…
The ideologically rigid, most-liberal governor in America (according to InsideGov), Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, yesterday vetoed a stopgap spending budget passed by the Republican-controlled House and Senate, further damaging the people he pretends to want to help–little children in schools. Falling back on the same old lies and political pandering rhetoric, Wolf said he was vetoing the bill because it “sells out the people of Pennsylvania to oil and gas companies and Harrisburg special interests.” It’s now open war on the Marcellus industry by the Wolf administration. In his veto letter, Wolf doesn’t mention that his own special interests–primarily teachers’ unions–are the real reason he’s holding out for an obscenely high severance tax on Marcellus Shale production. Sometimes politicians like Wolf have conveniently leaky memories. Wolf is perfectly happy with driving the state right over an economic cliff if he doesn’t get his way on a severance tax, no matter who (i.e., children) get hurt…
The Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will be in Pittsburgh tomorrow to conduct a hearing into how they can illegally regulate oil and gas drilling through the back door of so-called “fugitive” methane emissions, which they claim are insanely high in shale plays like the Marcellus/Utica (
The Christ-less editorial board of the Scranton Times-Tribune has all of a sudden gotten the Catholic religion. The anti-drilling Dems who run the Times-Tribune are normally religion-free–but since Pope Francis visited Philly and mouthed words that he believes in the myth of man-made global warming, Pope Francis (regardless of his stance on issues like abortion) is the new patron saint of the Times-Tribune. They go so far in their latest editorial as to link Pope Francis and another Democrat saint–John Quigley, the PennFuture Secretary of the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection…
Party time! Yesterday PennEast Pipeline filed their full, official application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for permission to commence building their $1 billion, 118-mile, 36-inch diameter pipeline that will deliver approximately 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day from the Marcellus gas fields of northeastern PA to locations in southeastern PA and across the border to Trenton, NJ. The long-term benefits to the pipeline are many–lower natural gas and electricity costs for millions of consumers. In addition, during construction the pipeline will generate an estimated $1.6 billion of economic impact during design and construction alone, supporting approximately 12,160 jobs and an associated $740 million in wages. This is good news for all Pennsylvanians and New Jerseyites. Of course anti-fossil fuel nutters also issued an angry press release claiming the PennEast Pipeline will do “irreparable harm” if built…
THE Delaware Riverkeeper, Maya van Rossum, and a bunch of her anti-fossil fuel pals delivered a letter on Wednesday to America’s most liberal governor, PA Gov. Tom Wolf, asking him to immediately suspend all further Marcellus drilling in the state and while he’s at it, stop building any new pipelines. They also “demand” (their words) that Wolf shut down his Pipeline Infrastructure Task Force which he created back in May (see 
The PennFuture Secretary of the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection, John Quigley, continues to promote a hard-left agenda inside a once-great agency. Any time a Democrat like Quigley pairs the word “justice” with another word, like “environmental”, you know it’s a bad idea. Quigley is promoting the concept of creating an “office of environmental justice” within the DEP. What does that even mean? Is Quigley implying we currently have environmental “injustice” running rampant through the Commonwealth? Quigley also wants to use revenue raised from an obscenely high severance tax on Marcellus Shale drilling to fund more DEP inspectors to hang out at drill pads. Must be Quigley didn’t get the memo from Wolf that ALL of the severance tax money, if Wolf is lucky enough to get such a tax passed (very much in doubt), has already been promised in a quid pro quo agreement to teachers’ unions that helped get him elected…
Halliburton, the second largest oilfield services company in the world and a major presence in northeast drilling, performed a self audit of their 80,000+ employees and found that just over 1,000 (1.4%) of their employees were eligible for overtime but didn’t receive it. Some of those workers are in Pennsylvania Marcellus–39 of them in fact, who are owed a collective $800,000 in back wages. Halliburton turned themselves in to the U.S. Dept. of Labor, admitting the mistake and offering to make it right. The company reached an agreement with the DOL to pay $18,293,557 to 1,016 employees nationwide for uncompensated overtime, one of the biggest such cases “in recent years” according to the DOL…