PA’s Natural Gas Star Beginning to Fade from Lack of Pipelines
It’s hard to underestimate the influence and role of Pennsylvania on the world’s energy sector, especially over the past 19 years with the rise of the Marcellus Shale. However, advocates for fossil energy (like the American Petroleum Institute) are expressing concerns that PA’s dominant role may change to one with far less influence. Why? Lack of pipelines to transport PA’s production to other regions (or to export plants). Their concerns are valid (see IFO: PA NatGas Production, Wells Spud Both Decreased in 3Q). Read More “PA’s Natural Gas Star Beginning to Fade from Lack of Pipelines”
In October, Pennsylvania Secretary of the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) Rich Negrin suddenly resigned after being on the job for less than a year (see 
Have you ever been around the kind of irritating person who says “No!” to everything? Someone who is perennially unhappy and loves to share that unhappiness with everyone around him or her? Someone who, when you offer valid solution after valid solution to a given “problem,” the person shoots each one down, unwilling to try anything? Such people are toxic. On an organizational level, we have a perfect example of such toxicness — the 
Republicans control the Senate in Pennsylvania. Until last year, Republicans also controlled the House. Now, leftist Democrats control the PA House by a single seat. As narrow as the numbers are, the philosophical divide between the two parties and the two chambers with respect to environmental issues is a chasm. Republicans like Sen. Gene Yaw, Chairman of the Senate Environmental Resources & Energy Committee, are focused on safe and responsible energy development and grid reliability in 2024. On the other hand, Democrats, like Greg Vitali, Chairman of the House Environmental Resources & Energy Committee, are focused on the mythology of man-made global warming and blocking anything remotely connected to fossil fuels. It means there is little to no room for compromise on environmental issues.
The Energy Workforce & Technology Council, located in Houston, TX, is a national trade association for the global energy technology and services sector, representing more than 650,000 U.S. jobs in the technology-driven energy value chain. The Energy Workforce Council works to advance member policy priorities and empower the energy workforce of the future. The Council closely tracks job numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Yesterday, the Council issued an update on O&G job numbers for December and for all of 2023. Interesting factoid: In December, the M-U industry employed 44,192 people.
A new article by Gordon Tomb — a senior fellow with the Commonwealth Foundation, a Pennsylvania-based, free-market think tank, and senior advisor with the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia — has the intriguing title: “Are ‘green’ agendas carrying governors to political cliffs?” While the article focuses on recent actions by PA Gov. Josh Shapiro and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon in pandering to the radical environmental movement, much of the article reviews the evidence that a majority of people across multiple countries are beginning to reject radical environmentalism by electing conservatives. The radicals swung the pendulum way too far and too fast, and now the pendulum is swinging back to sanity.
Diversified Energy Company, with major assets in the Appalachian region (including the Marcellus/Utica), announced yesterday the company had sold a majority stake in an unspecified number of Appalachian conventional oil and gas wells to an investment company called DP Lion Equity Holdco, for $200 million. 
In what has become a repeating pattern, indicating we may have hit bottom, last week, the Baker Hughes U.S. rig count added two rigs, going from 620 two weeks ago to 622 last week. The pattern is to lose a few and then gain a few every couple of weeks. After Pennsylvania lost a rig two weeks ago (see 
This is one of those little gems we delight in unearthing for MDN readers — especially for our landowner/rights owner readers. Researchers from the University of Rochester and the University of Pittsburgh assembled a dataset of lease deals used in the Pennsylvania Marcellus (some 60,000 of them!) and analyzed the leases for compensation and clauses that may protect landowner health and the enjoyment of their properties. The researchers used the data to produce three main findings…
The slight rise in the national rig count, with the count going up by one or two rigs a week over the past five weeks (what we call a “dead cat bounce”), is over. The Baker Hughes U.S. rig count lost ground again last week. The count went from 626 active rigs two weeks ago down to 623 last week. The Marcellus/Utica stayed even at 41 active rigs last week.