There’s No “There” There with PA Gov. Shapiro – Just Lots of Words
On May 2, 2023, some four months after Josh Shapiro was installed as Pennsylvania’s 48th governor, we said this about him: “Since taking office, Shapiro has been a major dud–someone who doesn’t know how to lead. He’s bereft of any idea of what to do and how to do it. When it comes to the environment and energy policy, Shapiro assembled a secretive group to guide him” (see Secretive PA Gov. Josh Shapiro a Major Dud Since Taking Office). It’s taken almost a year since that time, but others are now coming to the same conclusion, the conclusion that there’s no “there” there when it comes to Shapiro. He’s an empty suit with no idea of how to lead.
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Yesterday, the Pennsylvania House Republican Policy Committee held a hearing called “Fueling Pa’s Future: Liquid Natural Gas.” In January, Joe Biden announced he would “pause” any approvals for new LNG export plants (currently 17 requests in the pipeline) for at least one year while his people fart around pretending to figure out how to measure global warming as a new consideration for whether or not to approve projects (see 
In reviewing the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) Oil and Gas Workload Report for the week ending March 29, David Hess from the PA Environment Digest Blog discovered there is currently only one new shale permit under review for approval by the department. That is really low. Hess also discovered so far this year PA has received just 95 applications for new shale permits. At that rate, the state will only issue around 380 new permits in 2024 — the lowest since the modern shale era began.
This year’s presidential election may well turn on the results in the “swing state” of Pennsylvania. The Wall Street Journal has an intriguing story that looks at PA voters, who they support for president, and why. In the article ‘Now They’re Voting Red’: A Pennsylvania Fracking Boom Weighs on Biden’s Re-Election Chances, the WSJ says a slim majority of voters give Donald Trump a 3-point lead over Joementia if the election were held today. (How ANYONE could vote for Biden is a complete mystery to us.) “Economic churn” and Biden’s actions like his infamous LNG pause are pushing voters toward Trump in the Pittsburgh area, potentially overwhelming the Democrats’ base of college-educated workers. Could it be that pro-frackers in PA will hand the White House back to DJT?
Last week, the Baker Hughes rig count dropped another rig. The count went from 621 active rigs two weeks ago down to 620 last week. This is the third week in a row the national count has lost rigs. Since last October, the national count has gone as low as 616 and as high as 629. And that’s it. No higher and no lower. The Marcellus/Utica remained the same last week at 42 active rigs. However, there were some musical chairs. Pennsylvania gained one rig and now operates 22 rigs. West Virginia lost a rig and now operates 8 rigs. Ohio remained steady with 12 active rigs.
Last week, MDN reported on new (to us) information shared at a Pennsylvania House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee hearing that the state’s program to plug orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells is, quite frankly, a hot mess (see 
The government screws up just about everything it touches — ever notice that? A perfect example is a water testing program set up by then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro in December 2022. In August 2022, Shapiro, who AG at the time, announced that he had finally bullied Energy Transfer into pleading “no contest” (meaning they don’t admit to a darned thing) in a so-called criminal case against the company for a series of accidents affecting construction for both the Revolution and Mariner East pipelines (see 
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro traveled to Scranton, PA, in mid-March to announce a proposal to “immediately pull Pennsylvania out of a multi-state carbon cap-and-trade program” (the so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI) and instead enroll PA in its very own RGGI-like carbon tax program (see 
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro traveled to Scranton, PA, in mid-March to announce a proposal to “immediately pull Pennsylvania out of a multi-state carbon cap-and-trade program” (the so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI) and instead enroll PA in its very own RGGI-like carbon tax program (see 
An article appears today in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette detailing how some people already are (or are planning to) make money from plugging orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania (and elsewhere). It involves the same old cockamamie scam of carbon tax credits. The rough outline is this: Companies measure how much methane is currently leaking from a well. Then they fix it (presumably using government money to at least help pay for plugging), and once it’s fixed, they issue/create a carbon tax credit (or token) that someone else can buy on a public marketplace. Why buy it? So that person or company or entity can keep right on “polluting” — the carbon credit will “offset” their pollution. What a scam!
According to the data geeks at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), U.S. natural gas production grew by 4% in 2023, which was similar to the growth in 2022. U.S. gas production in 2023 averaged a whopping 125.0 Bcf/d (billion cubic feet per day). In 2023, more natural gas was produced in the Appalachia (Marcellus/Utica) region of the Northeast than in any other U.S. region, accounting for 29%, or 37.7 Bcf/d, of gross natural gas production. However, production growth in Appalachia slowed because our region doesn’t have enough pipeline takeaway capacity to transport more natural gas out of the region to the markets that would buy it.
In 2004, Pennsylvania implemented one of the most aggressive mandates to adopt wind and solar energy. At the time, less than 1% of net energy generation came from wind and solar in the Keystone State. In 2023, after the state had spent nearly $1.5 billion in subsidies, wind and solar generated less than 2%. And yet current Gov. Josh Shapiro (liberal Democrat) wants to double down by requiring 35% of electricity to come from politically favored sources, such as wind and solar, by 2035. The one energy source that has PROVEN to reduce carbon dioxide emissions? That would be natural gas, which is not on the politically favored sources list.
Last week, MDN brought you a story about the rampant cost inflation for plugging old conventional abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells in the Keystone State (see 
It’s full speed ahead for the radical anti-Marcellus Democrats in the Pennsylvania State Legislature. Last week, PA Gov. Josh Shapiro traveled to Scranton, PA, to do a dog-and-pony show announcing his personalized version of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) carbon tax that would apply only to PA (see 
Honestly, we can’t heap enough praise on the excellent work done by Pennsylvania shale drillers. It is unreasonable to expect there will be absolutely zero problems when engaging in something as complex as drilling a mile straight down and then one to four miles horizontally underground. Nothing in life is error-free. NOTHING. There’s always a problem. There’s always a slight error somewhere. Yet in PA drilling, only 54 shale wells out of 14,412 drilled since 2004 have resulted in the shale well “communicating with” (interfering with or leaking methane to) nearby water wells, conventional wells, abandoned wells, or other shale wells. That’s 0.0037 of the time, or 3.7 wells for every 1,000 drilled. Converting that number to a percentage, it’s 0.37% (about one-third of a single percentage point). Rounding further, it’s 0% of the time.
Plugging old abandoned (which means no longer producing) and orphaned (meaning the owner is not known) wells is not a simple thing to do. It’s estimated that Pennsylvania has perhaps 350,000 old abandoned and orphaned wells, many of them leftover from the early days of conventional oil drilling. The problem is finding them. Many are in out-of-the-way places. Plugging them cheaply is no simple matter. PA, OH, and WV have received millions from the federal government to help with their well plugging programs in an effort to control so-called fugitive methane. Over the past year, PA has plugged over 200 old wells (see