Yale Prostitutes Itself – Says Fracking Linked to Leukemia in PA Kids
Along with Harvard, Yale University used to be one of the top two higher ed schools in the country. Wow, how the mighty have fallen! Yale is a husk, a shell of what it once was. Yale now puts political ideology above science and generates garbage, calling it “research.” Yale is experiencing some major cognitive dissonance. At various points over the past decade, Yale researchers have claimed fracking does NOT contaminate water aquifers (see Yale Study Finds Fracking Doesn’t Contaminate Water Aquifers) and that fracking does not affect water wells in Pennsylvania specifically (see New Yale U Study Finds Fracking Does Not Affect PA Water Wells). But then other researchers at Yale have claimed fracking causes STDs (see Recycled Pap: Yale Study Says Fracking Causes STDs in Mult. States), and the university is attempting to brainwash everyone into dropping the use of the term “natural gas,” attempting to replace it with something, anything else (see Why is Yale U Trying to Change Name of NatGas & Who is Funding It?). Now comes a “study” (which is no such thing) claiming little kids who grow up near fracked wells in PA are twice as likely to get cancer. How low can you possibly go?
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Yesterday the Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office (IFO) released its latest quarterly Natural Gas Production Report for April through June 2022 (full copy below). There were 133 new horizontal wells spud (drilled) in 2Q22, an increase of 13 wells (10.8%) compared to 2Q21. However, natural gas production volume was 1,836 billion cubic feet (Bcf) in 2Q22, a slight decrease (-0.9%) from 2Q21. It is the second quarterly decrease in production in a row. It appears that maybe PA has hit a plateau for natural gas production.
The only thing the so-called Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Foundation (PEDF) “defends” is their own twisted philosophy of trying to gouge out the eyes of the oil and gas industry in PA–even at the expense of de-funding their own beloved PA Dept. of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR). In two PA Supreme Court rulings, one in 2017 and another in 2021, PEDF won the right to limit how revenues from oil and gas drilling on state land can be used. The PA legislature reworded its budget directives and began using those revenues to fund day-to-day expenses at DCNR. PEDF sued again. Commonwealth Court rejected PEDF’s arguments against how the legislature allocated the money, and two weeks ago, the PA Supreme Court upheld Commonwealth Court’s rejection. Translation: PEDF just lost a major case they’ve been waging since 2017 to block drilling on state-owned land (by blocking how royalty revenue is used).
Gas Field Specialists, headquartered in Potter County, PA, is an oilfield services (OFS) company that works in the Marcellus Shale in northern Pennsylvania. The company also does OFS work in western New York State. According to a settlement reached with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Gas Field Specialists will pay a former employee (rig worker/mechanic) $184,000 after firing him because he had cancer.
Every single year Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf proposed a budget (all eight years of his ignominious occupation of the office), he insisted on raising taxes on the Marcellus industry by adding a high severance tax to an already-high impact tax. Every. Single. Year. In addition to an impact (i.e. severance) tax in PA, Marcellus drillers must pay an insanely high corporate net income tax (CNIT) of 9.99%. All businesses in the state are subject to the CNIT. Because of the high tax burden (the impact tax and the CNIT added together), many drillers have decided to expand elsewhere, like West Virginia, Ohio, and Louisiana. Now that he’s leaving office, Wolf has signed on to a reduction of the CNIT, claiming he never liked that nasty ole tax anyway.
Loathsome and disgusting shale energy hater Josh Shapiro, Attorney General for Pennsylvania (running for governor), announced on Friday that he 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. Shapiro brought the case–a case that converts accidents into crimes–in order to burnish his credibility with the wacko left in his own party. Now he has a “victory” to run on–and everyone in Pennsylvania is the poorer because of it.
Earlier this week, Energy Transfer (ET), the builder of the mighty Mariner East pipelines and owner/expander of the Marcus Hook refinery, issued its second quarter update. The company had plenty of positive news to report, including net income of $1.33 billion, a $700 million increase from the same period last year. In July, the company hit a new record high for the amount of NGLs flowing through the Mariner East pipeline system. It has also found a way to squeeze another roughly 10,000 barrels per day of NGL exports out of Marcus Hook.
In July 2018, a group of 100+ southwestern Pennsylvania landowners sued EQT for failure to pay them rental fees for storing natural gas under their properties (see 
New Jersey Resources’ Adelphia Gateway project converts an old oil pipeline stretching from Northampton County, PA through Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester counties, terminating in Delaware County at Marcus Hook, into a natural gas pipeline. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued final approval for the project in December 2019 (see 
One of the criticisms MDN has levied against the states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, is that each state is attempting to “go it alone” with respect to attracting a $2 billion investment from the federal government for a hydrogen and CCUS (carbon capture, utilization and storage) hub in our region (see 
Two weeks ago, Pennsylvania House Bill (HB) 2644 was passed into law, becoming Act 96 of 2022. The new law requires the state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) to use a portion of new federal funding to create a grant program to support experienced well-plugging companies that work to maximize the volume of orphan wells being plugged in the Commonwealth. It also keeps the right to raise bonding amounts for conventional wells with the legislature rather than allowing PA’s unelected Democrat bureaucrats in the bowels of the DEP’s Environmental Quality Board (EQB) from doing it–which has the left screaming bloody murder.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s plan to force PA’s coal- and natural gas-fired power plants to begin paying an obscenely high tax on carbon dioxide emissions as part of the so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) got blocked on July 1 by PA Commonwealth Court (see 
Some politicians make us ill. One of them is John Fetterman, currently Pennsylvania’s undistinguished Lt. Governor and the Democrat candidate for the U.S. Senate to take over the seat being vacated by Pat Toomey. Fetterman is a radial socialist who, in 2016, signed a pledge to ban all fracking nationwide, including his home state of PA. Now that he’s running for the Senate, Fetterman has changed his tune and thinks that at least some fracking is OK. He is a liar.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who is running for governor of the Keystone State, has once again targeted a shale energy company in his zeal to prove he despises the Marcellus even more than current Gov. Tom Wolf does (burnishing his credentials with the environmental left who makes up his base). Yesterday Shapiro’s office issued a press release announcing that the Big Man has bullied Southeast Directional Drilling, a subcontractor of National Fuel Gas Supply Corporation (i.e. Seneca Resources), into pleading guilty to spilling nontoxic drilling mud into a creek so small it doesn’t have a name. Southeast will have to pay a $15,000 fine.