PA Gov. Wolf Instructs DEP to Draft New Regs Following Act 96
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, controlled by the extreme left in the Democrat Party, allowed PA House Bill (HB) 2644 to become law without his signature (see today’s companion story, New PA Act 96 Helps Boost Plugging Orphan Wells – Left Goes Nuts). Wolf took a big hit from the lunatics in his own party following his inaction on 2644. Now he’s trying to make up for it. Over the weekend, Wolf published a notice in the Pennsylvania Bulletin to justify his action of allowing 2644 to become law (now called Act 96), and to instruct the state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) to enact new regulations clamping down on how it regulates conventional oil and gas wells to prevent new abandoned wells. In other words, expect the DEP under Wolf (and Shapiro, if he wins in November, God forbid) to generate all sorts of onerous new regulations in the name of preventing new orphaned wells from popping up.
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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.
Anti-fossil fuel activists are agitating in Pennsylvania to get the state Dept. of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) to drop a $5,000 initial (and subsequent $500 annual) fee to access what is called the Exploration and Development Well Information Network (EDWIN) database. The EDWIN database contains details about oil and gas wells throughout the state, including data on the location, ownership status, construction information, and completion reports. DCNR uses the Dept. of Environmental Protection’s database as a starting point and cleans it up, making it more useful.
What’s fair is fair. If a county blocks drilling under county-owned land, as the Allegheny County Council recently did (see 
Last week MDN reported that Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, in a final act of thumbing his nose at the prolific Marcellus industry in his own state, vetoed a bill, Senate Bill (SB) 275, that would have prohibited municipalities from banning the use of natural gas (see 
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s foolish 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 
In June the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) Environmental Quality Board (EQB) adopted an onerous new regulation that supposedly will capture every last molecule of stray methane that leaks from shale drilling operations (see 
We finally have some good news to share with respect to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s foolish 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). After exhausting various attempts to block it, Wolf published a final RGGI regulation in the Pennsylvania Bulletin in April (see 
Just yesterday MDN told you about this year’s distribution of last year’s (2021) impact fee revenue to local municipalities and to the black hole of Harrisburg politicians (see